I also welcome - willkommen - my neighbour and our German ambassador. I cannot follow Senator Kelleher's contribution. My German is limited to "Wo ist den Campingplatz, mein lieber Schatz?" That is about it. On a serious note, though, from the Gesellschaft of European relationships and international relationships to the Gemeinschaft of our personal relationships across all our diplomatic community here in Dublin, we are very lucky with the people we have. I thank the ambassador again for a great evening at German Unity Day on Tuesday.

I want to talk about this country and what kind of a country it is because we need, after the budget, to have a conversation about this. I had as guests here surgeons from Phoenix, Arizona, the Christmas of 2025. They had access to and sight of the medical records of children on the urology waiting lists and spinal surgery waiting lists in Children's Health Ireland, CHI, and they told me that they did not see cases like those in the United States except for when, as part of their pro bono practice, they dealt with people who had come as medical refugees from Latin America and were in advanced stages of illness and cancer that were not normally seen in developed countries. One of the surgeons said that that was the category into which our children fit. We have thousands of disabled children in Ireland on the urology waiting list who, for a lack of a routine and small surgical intervention - the urology pathway and the spinal pathway have been established in medicine for over 50 years - become infertile and incontinent. Their little reproductive organs do not develop. They are denied even that part of their human development. They are more prone to pancreatic, cervical, prostate and bowel cancer. That is happening in one of the wealthiest countries in the European Union, and you have to ask yourself why.

I will tell the House why. We as a society assign less human value to disabled citizens than we do to the rest of the population. I know from speaking to medical professionals in CHI that when children, God forbid, come in from road traffic collisions or are suffering from cancer, heroic measures are taken to save them. Disabled children, however, die on waiting lists - disabled children like my son, who did not get a surgery until 2018. Let me be very clear: when the Minister, Deputy Carroll MacNeill, says that any kind of inquiry or investigation will be time limited to six years, that will not deal with my son's situation. It will not deal with others who were taken off surgical wait lists, like Harvey Morrison Sherratt, who died. He was made palliative. The note said the fella could not even sneeze, and then he died.

We are an ableist state. We are an apartheid state when it comes to disabled citizens. We had Before We Die in the Helix, in DCU. There are 55,000 disabled adults living at home - forced to live at home - with parents over the age of 60, and now I am in that category. There are thousands living at home with parents in their 70s, or even in their 90s, caring for disabled children. What kind of a society is this? I look forward with interest to seeing how the Government will deal with this in the budget, but when the budget is over and the dust has settled, we need to have a proper conversation in this House about the rights of disabled citizens and adults. We are 50 years behind Germany in terms of legislation and rights.