Ceisteanna ó Cheannairí - Leaders' Questions Dail Éireann — 2026-05-13 ============================================================ Paul Murphy (PBP), Dublin South-West Fianna Fáil's former leader and Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, has engaged in disgusting racism in Dublin Central, saying we have “too many” immigrants and saying, "The ones I worry about are the Africans", and that, "We can’t be taking in people from the Congo and all these places." He said he worries about the next generation of Muslims. Bertie Ahern doing it makes the agenda very blatant: scapegoat immigrants and divide ordinary people. Why? So that nobody blames Bertie Ahern, Fianna Fáil and the landlords and developers Fianna Fáil has allowed to profit from the housing crisis. People from the Congo did not take corrupt payments from developers to blow up the property bubble. They were never found by a tribunal to have been untruthful in explaining how €400,000 in today's money passed through their bank accounts. Muslim children did not crash the economy, causing years of misery and austerity for ordinary people. Unlike Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, they never rolled out the red carpet for developers and vulture funds. They are not the ones who sowed the seeds of the current housing disaster and they were not the ones who refused to maintain council flats and then voted to increase council rents. All of this is an act of mass distraction. From what? From the horrendous conditions many people in Dublin Central are forced to face every day. Right across Dublin city there are council tenants living in conditions that nobody should be asked to live in. Yesterday, in Sheridan Court on Dorset Street, we met a single mother with two children with additional needs. She is three months living without usable water because it is scalding hot. She has to bring her children to her mother's house in Fairview to bathe them. Her bedroom is severely damp and mouldy. I am holding up a photo of her bathroom - we can see the mould. Another woman is sleeping in the living room as her bedroom has been rendered uninhabitable due to leakages in the ceilings and walls. This is a photo of the hole in the wall of her bedroom. Another resident's ceiling collapsed in places in January. Her flat is not in a livable condition but she has nowhere else to go. Her ceiling can be seen in this photo. The only work done for the people in Sheridan Court has been superficial. However, it is not just Sheridan Court; it is right across Dublin city. To add insult to injury, Dublin City Council has hiked these people's rents by 30%, an amount that many of them simply cannot afford. Councillors from Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, Labour and the Green Party shamefully voted against a budget amendment that would have stopped that rent hike. I have two simple questions for the Taoiseach. I want answers to them. First, will he commit to the residents of Sheridan Court and other flats around Dublin city that this treatment will not continue and that people in 2026 will not be asked to live like this? Second, will he support a reversal of these unfair rent increases in Dublin city and drop his agenda to hike council rents right across the country? --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-05-13/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-09-14T01:01:03+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-05-13