Senator Ahearn, who is the Acting Leader, is doing a brilliant job.

I rise to speak about kinship care. It is where children are raised full-time by relatives, close family members, friends, grandparents, aunts or uncles after a parent has passed away.

Kinship Care Ireland is not fully supported by the State. It gets little or no State funding. Payment grants for children are little supported by the State. My ask this afternoon is that we have a debate on kinship care, the vital work of the organisation and, most importantly, the 12,000 children who are in kinship care. We talk a lot about adoption and children in care and we too often forget about critical organisations like Kinship Care. The workers in Kinship Care have been in contact with many Senators and many TDs as well. I think many colleagues would agree that we should have a debate specifically on the critical work and service Kinship Care delivers to 12,000 children in this country.