-----which cannot be forever debated in empty soundbites.

The child comes first. Do not mind your "wow". The child comes first all the time. The Deputy is not in the Gaiety School of Acting now.

The bottom line is it is a serious issue for children-----

-----and as far as I am concerned-----

-----we must focus on allocation on a child-based approach and a needs-based approach.

Everyone on this side of the House is as familiar with the issues as Deputy McDonald is. She does not have a monopoly on it and she should not pretend she does.

First of all, as we have outlined already - I said it last week in response to Deputy Bacik - any additional SNAs that were identified by the council as being required by a particular school will get this in the context of that review, so they will get that. The funding is additional to the education budget and will not be taken from any other part of the education budget. It is not an initiative without a plan. The Government never signed off on this at a governmental level, and I would just make that point to the…

I will take responsibility for the fact that well over 8,000 additional special needs assistants have been allocated to our schools since 2020. Let us have a sense of perspective here. Less of the rhetoric and the doomsday language.

I did not interrupt the Deputy. I would appreciate if I had the same opportunity. Well over 8,000 additional special needs assistants - that is not cutbacks, that is expansion, at an exponential rate. There is huge, growing need. We need to analyse that and reflect on it. That is why we are bringing a therapy-based service into our schools. That is an important intervention and I think one of the more significant decisions that this Government has taken, that there will be a therapy-based service in all our special…

Yes, you have.

I am very clear about this and very focused and I have a very clear idea because I have been working on this all my political life, so I know a fair bit about it. What I am simply saying is that we need additional supports, but we need to have multidisciplinary supports, in my view, in our schools, to help children in a more comprehensive and holistic way.

When the Deputy says "change the approach", the approach has been of expansion. We have gone from 16,000 to 25,000-plus. Is the Deputy saying we should change that approach? I am not clear when she says we should change the approach. The Deputy said special classes were called into question. They were never called into question as a result of the letters that went out last week. We have 3,741 special classes - how in the name of God could they be called into question? Let us be factual about it. The number of speci…

-----has increased significantly over the past two to three years and five years. The Deputy should just go through the figures - they are objectively there. They increased dramatically last year and will increase I think by 300 more again this year. I do not know how the Deputy can credibly put that out there that somebody was questioning the very existence of special classes when we are increasing them exponentially. As I said, the census data indicates significant increases in the number of young people and chil…

We do have an overall approach but there have been 8,775 new special needs assistants in the past five years since 2020, 16 new special schools in the past five years and a new therapy-based service in our special schools, and that will expand. Those are not words; they are facts. They are on the ground. That is what is going to happen. We have an overall approach. We have established a Cabinet subcommittee on disability to look at all aspects. Today, the Minister, Deputy Calleary, had sanction to begin a public co…

-----national strategy and we have had meetings with all of the organisations in respect of that. I have established a disability unit in the Department of an Taoiseach to have that overall picture of all aspects of the life cycle of a child or a person with special needs. It is very challenging, particularly in the health service side of it. That is why in the past number of years we took disability out of the Department of Health and created its own Department with the Department of children to have that overarch…

-----the lives of people with disabilities in the country from birth right through life itself.

First, in respect of the assessment of the need issue, we need a changed approach. An assessment of need is not required for many services. It is our view-----

I have three minutes. The Deputy started off with the-----

The Deputy started off by raising the issue of assessments of need. I was making the point that our view is that the therapists should be directed at providing services. That is the change that needs to happen in the system. That is why the Minister has brought forward legislation that is designed to do that and to release the resources to support children with special needs in a more direct fashion. That is the approach we are going to take. On the issue of special needs assistants, well over 25,000 will be alloca…

It is a team-based approach. Special education teachers are recruited-----