I am not fully aware of the details behind or the range of cases that might have given rise to the comments the Deputy has made. I will discuss this with the Minister for Justice and alert him to the Deputy's raising the issue on the floor of the House and how he feels there are serious matters of public interest that need to be reflected upon.

Senator McGreehan raised the same issue at our parliamentary party meeting yesterday evening. I will revert to the Minister, Deputy McConalogue, as the Deputy has raised it here, but to be fair to him he has, over his term, responded consistently to different issues as they have arisen in particular sectors of the food production system. Clearly, sheep farmers are finding the going difficult right now and a range of factors are responsible for that. The Minister will respond.

I am not too sure that is the issue because we have had fairly rapid developments in special education in the past two and a half years. New schools have been established for the first time in over a decade. We have had two to three new special schools and new ASD units. The Department of Education was given the green light to spend a lot of capital moneys in the last year and it did. It went ahead of budget. There are ongoing talks in Government on trying to facilitate, especially in the area of special education,…

I thank the Deputy for raising this issue. The Minister and the HSE have already announced the programme and response in terms of dealing with the issue and accelerating the times for people to get their results.

I disagree with the Deputy saying that if the area was more affluent, this would not be acceptable.

I am sorry-----

This Government is committed to prioritising schools that have bigger challenges than others.

Full stop. I do not know the circumstances of this school.

Regarding what the ask should have been, I do not know if the school has applied. I presume it has.

That is the key point.

I am sorry; I just wish to make this point. The Deputy spoke about the prefabs.

Of course they should be replaced. The issue is where is the application, when did it come in, what is its status, if the design team is finished and if it is progressing.

Is the scheme being progressed now? That is all I need to know.

I appreciate the Deputy raising this issue with me. I will talk to the Minister of State, Deputy Chambers, regarding it and see what we can do to get the situation resolved.

We are primarily dealing with the energy and cost-of-living crises with existing resources. It has not been dependent on the windfall tax that we announced we would be bringing in. This must be legislated for. It was announced last November and must go through the legislative process.

In the meantime, however, we must sort out this situation. Since January 2022, we have allocated more than €9.5 billion to households. I am not referring to businesses. The temporary business energy support scheme, TBESS, for businesses is additional. This €9.5 billion is a substantial intervention to try to help people to meet what undoubtedly are severe challenges with respect to electricity and other energy bills. We have intervened quite substantially and there will be further payments or energy credits in Marc…

I thank the Ceann Comhairle for reminding us of the horrors of nuclear war, and for his comments in respect of the terrible war being waged upon the people of Ukraine as a result of the illegal and immoral invasion of their country by the Russian Federation. Closer to home, like many others, I find myself struggling to comprehend the savagery and depravity of last night's attack on Detective Chief Inspector John Caldwell, a man whose day job is finding and prosecuting those responsible for the worst and most danger…

In my time, we put unprecedented investment into infrastructure in Cork. Regrettably, in the past while, significant proposals did not come forward to the degree that they should have.

I come from the region and I am well aware of the position. The projects are now coming on stream. The lack of ready-to-go projects in respect of certain hospitals has been a cause of concern for me. That is why we are looking at a faster method in the context of getting projects delivered. We are saying that we will build more facilities and increase the number of beds. We are going to do this and it will be additional to the unprecedented 1,000 beds provided since 2020. We did not experience a similar expansion i…

Parallel with that, there has been a massive increase in the number of people working within our health service. In that context, there are 17,000 more people working in the health service than was the case at the beginning of 2020. That is a 15% increase and it includes more than 5,000 nurses, nearly 3,000 health and social care professionals and 1,800 doctors and dentists. We need to and will do more to provide additional capacity in the context of both personnel and beds.