Last weekend, I was delighted to attend a ceremony celebrating a centenary of light, 100 years of LauraLynn providing palliative care for children, celebrating beyond the establishment of LauraLynn to the legacy bodies that it worked with, the Children’s Sunshine Home and, indeed, Ella Webb who started treating children with rickets in 1925. Tá mé comh bhródúil. I am very proud that all this work has been done in Leopardstown in my constituency of Dublin Rathdown.

LauraLynn provides crucial work. It is the only organisation in this country providing palliative care for children. It gives children choice at the end of life and dignity and it provides families with the opportunity to create memories. LauraLynn and many other organisations in the community and voluntary sector operate on threadbare budgets despite the fact that they provide these short gaps that the State does not provide. These are crucial services up and down the country. Will the Minister commit in budget 2026 to providing multi-annual funding, core funding, to finally allow us to move away from this philanthropic model of 100 years ago to a modern State which properly funds these organisations to adequately support families up and down the country?

I am very familiar with the work of the LauraLynn foundation and the really important care and support it provides to young children. On the Deputy’s particular request for multi-annual funding, I do not believe the budget will deliver that. This House passes budgets year by year. It is therefore very difficult, and I do not believe it should happen, that we can give current funding commitments that go beyond the budgetary commitments of a single year. The only places that we make multiannual funding available are with regard to capital investment but that is needed to deliver big projects that we all depend on. What we do see happen in core funding and current funding in general is year by year it does go up. I cannot comment on what is going to happen with regard to LauraLynn for 2026 because it all depends on the budget.

I recognise the work it does and I am explaining why multiannual funding is just something that is, for good reason, difficult for us to commit to.