I am delighted to see my colleague Senator Brady as Acting Leader. Well done to him.

On behalf of myself and my Fine Gael colleagues, I pass on our condolences to the usher Seamus Carroll and to all the staff who were friends with him. We are very sorry for their loss.

For the past two weeks, I have been a mammy going around secondary schools on opening nights and trying to figure out the best place for my daughter. I have two girls. They are "Irish twins", so there are decisions to be made for both of them because they come one after the other. I feel the weight is on my shoulders about making sure they get into the right school because going into secondary school is such a massive step.

This morning, I got a phone call from another mammy in the exact same position as me. She is going around trying to find the best school for her daughter. Her daughter has autism. She rang some schools in the Meath West constituency and asked what provisions there are for an open night for her daughter. She asked whether there would be less noise and fewer people and whether they could come in 15 minutes or 20 minutes beforehand. Unfortunately, the schools had not thought that some children with autism might be coming in and might need to just have a bit of calm. That is something I would like us to look at when we talk about inclusive education, and we use those two words quite regularly. The other thing the mammy said to me was that she had gone around two schools. There were four schools her daughter could apply for but only two had autism units. Of the 540 students who will be looking for places, two autism places were going to be available for 2027, so her child has a one-in-270 chance of getting into an autism class. Her child wants to be in a mainstream school and wants to feel accepted by her peers but she needs that extra bit of help in an autism unit. When listening to this lady, I felt so selfish thinking about my concerns about going around looking for a place for my daughter when I do not have the extra worry of trying to figure out whether there will be an autism unit in a mainstream school for her. Although we are spending more than ever, and although I am sure that the Government will put even more into this year's budget, we have to keep looking at what we are doing for students with autism, where the autism units are and, with densely populated areas like Navan with almost 40,000 people in it, how we can possibly have only two schools with autism classes for girls to go to. I plead with the Acting Leader to write to the Minister for education and ask where we are on autism units in Navan and in Meath West more widely for girls who are looking to go to school in 2027. I cannot imagine the stress that that mammy is under right now.