First, I welcome the students to the Chamber. It is great to see young people actively working and engaging in our processes of parliamentary democracy.

As this will be my last contribution on the Order of Business this side of 2026 because I will only be here for a short time tomorrow, I will take this opportunity to thank a few people. I thank my colleagues across both Houses. We come from a different perspective in the Opposition. It is more difficult, of course, and we have to scrutinise the legislation. The Government side has the legislation and effectively their hands are tied. There is very little movement in terms of amendments. They do have amendments but not the same number of them because they are collectively Members on the Government side. That should not come as a surprise to any Member on the Government side of the Seanad. It has been a huge learning curve for many of us. Some people are new here. It has been a particularly exciting year. Many of us have been elected and some have been appointed by the Taoiseach and it is always a great privilege, whatever strand one comes into the Seanad from.

I thank Mr. Martin Hughes, our now Clerk of the Seanad. He has excelled in his position. He has a lot of experience in this House anyway. I also thank Ms Aileen Fallon, our Clerk Assistant, and all the staff of the Seanad Office. I thank Ms Orla Murray, who is instrumentally involved in the Leader's office, and I thank the Leader for the way we have operated these Houses. It is not always easy but we are always mindful that we have to be respectful of one another and our positions. While we might have robust engagement, we leave here at the end of the day to move on to the next task. That is the task of politics. We have to be pragmatic, we have to push on and we have to be able to do business with other people at different times. At our level of engagement it is always important we have a good, healthy and robust debate but we also have a relationship that allows us to progress legislation and move on with other people. I thank the Cathaoirleach, particularly for his initiative that we will have today - the beginning of the Seanad Select Committee on EU Scrutiny and Transparency. That is a very important measure the Cathaoirleach has introduced and I look forward to engaging with the committee later.

Over the past few weeks I have taken the time to look at all the Commencement matters from the past 12 months and many of the contributions under the Order of Business.

There are really three recurring themes, which are health, housing and mental health. It might be no harm at some stage to look at that because people come in time and again, particularly from the Government side, with concerns about leaking roofs, lack of classroom places, school transport and many such things. They have constituents, too, or they have other interests.

If we are going to use our time wisely, we need to look at that and see how we can address it. We have Government Senators talking to Government Ministers about such issues and there does not seem to be any resolution. I will leave it at that. We have to work more constructively to tackle issues and put a timeframe in place.

I wish everyone a good and happy Christmas and new year.