The Sacred Heart Boys National School in Ballygall caters for boys from Ballygall, Glasnevin, Finglas and Ballymun. The school requires two additional newly built classrooms for 12 children with special needs.

There is an urgent need for autism spectrum disorder, ASD, units and classroom facilities for children with autism and special needs in the area. The Department of Education planning section is holding up progress on this badly needed facility. This needs to be addressed as a matter of urgency as families and children are getting really frustrated by these ongoing delays.

I thank Deputy Ellis for raising this important issue. I know the school, although I do not know the particular school project. I will have to inquire with the Minister of State, Deputy Madigan, and ask her to come back to the Deputy with some more detail. We have a very significant budget for school buildings this year, but many projects are falling behind. We need to make sure that we speed them up, and that will be true in my constituency as well as the Deputy's.

This is kind of on the same matter. I want to raise with the Taoiseach the issue of Bailieborough Community School, which was built many years ago but for 600 students. Back in September of 2022, it was approved to almost double the footprint of that school. That school currently has 740 students. I am going to cut to the chase. The board of management, the principal and I have made many requests to the Department of Education on this. We are simply seeking to move from design stage 2A to 2B. It has been stuck at stage 2A for eight months. The school is doing Trojan work to stagger breaks, classes, physical education, and everything just to manage the situation. Can the Taoiseach make an intervention? Perhaps the Department of public expenditure needs a little bit of a shove on this as well. We really need to see something happen, however. It is deeply unfair to the principal and staff who are trying to manage the situation.

This is something on which we are working. As the Deputy knows, I represent Dublin West, which is a rapidly growing area, as is the Deputy’s constituency now as well. There has been a big increase in population, and we have a huge school building programme across the country at the moment at primary and second level. There is a pipeline, and sometimes it moves very well and sometimes it slows down. It is a bit slow at the moment. The Ministers, Deputies Donohoe and Foley, are working very closely on how we can move some of those projects along and speed up that pipeline because it is very much needed. As people will see from the expenditure figures released today, however, spending this year so far by Government is 20% higher than it was last year. We are ahead of profile in terms of spending so far this year. It is not, therefore, the case that the Government is not spending money. We are, and we need to have regard to that too because we are now increasing spending at a rate much faster than the economy is growing and well above the rate of inflation. We just need to not forget about the mistakes of the past too.