You would want to have a heart of stone not to be moved by the parents of children with additional needs who spoke to us last week. They broke down telling their stories of the failure of the State to provide them with appropriate school places and services. I am supporting parents in my constituency whose children are locked out of education. In area CHO 9 more than 3,000 children are waiting for an initial contact from children's disability services. We are organising a public meeting on that this Thursday.

What is the Taoiseach doing to ensure each child in north Dublin will have access to an appropriate school place by this September and access to assessment of need and proper adequate services from the children's disability services? This is not moving quickly or adequately enough. To give an example, one school opened a special class and had 26 applications for six places. Is this acceptable?

This is no consolation to any parent or child seeking a place now but there has been an exponential growth in the number of special classes in the country over the past four years. Over a five-year period we now have 19,000 children attending special classes. Five years ago that number was 9,000. There has been constant expansion of the provision of special classes. In the past four years 11 new special schools have opened. This year alone there will be five more. As I said earlier, close to 4,000 special education places will be provided by September this year. I will ask the Minister to talk to the Deputy in terms of specific solutions for specific school areas. Last week he said to me that Dublin was the one area that had not been closed off and that they were working extremely hard to get every child looked after and facilitated.