If the Tánaiste or I want to get a Bus Éireann bus or an Iarnród Éireann train, including a DART, we just turn up at the station, buy a ticket and get on. Wheelchair users cannot do that. There is an expectation that they should give up to 24 hours notice to use an ordinary transport system that is provided and subsidised by the taxpayers of this country. Surely it is not beyond us to provide a better facility for wheelchair users. I acknowledge that there are new DART carriages coming, but they are up to two years…

I broadly welcome the Bill. It is not a very long Bill but it is important insofar as it sets out important minimum standards. One thing on which we can all agree is that we must make this process easier for the people who need assistance. We must make it easier for people to get the assessments and to get help in place so that they can then reap the benefits of that assistance. We know that there are people the length and breadth of this country who need assistance and who, in reality, are not getting it or not ge…

I thank the Minister of State for coming in to deal with this issue. He will be aware that his Department put in place a number of years ago an interim remediation scheme for apartment buildings built during a certain period to deal particularly with fire safety issues. This is right and it is important to put it in place. Most importantly it deals with fire issues. There is an urgency that comes with that, which there might not be with poor upkeep or other structural issues. The idea behind the scheme is that resi…

I really appreciate what the Minister of State said at the end of the answer. I appreciate his positive engagement on this. As he says, we had a conversation about this earlier today. I appreciate his undertaking to raise this with the officials because there is a gap, in fairness, in this situation. I understand what he has said about the validation process but he has to remember that these people, through their OMC, wrote in, applied for the scheme and were told yes. It took nearly two years before the Housing Ag…

Cuirim fáilte roimh an mBille. Is Bille mór atá i gceist: tá a lán rudaí tábhachtacha ann. There is a lot in this. It is a timely update of many of the rules around driver and vehicle licensing. I might touch on a few points of the Bill. The first relates to the check my vehicle facility provided for in section 7 of Part 2. It is important to make that information available publicly. Somebody who works in my office bought a second-hand car recently and used the private vehicle checking websites, which cleared the v…

In April 2022, I was pleased to support the cut in public transport fares in the aftermath of Covid by between 20% and 50%, depending on what kind of ticket passengers were using. At that time, the rationale was expressed that lower fares made public transport more attractive and more accessible and, therefore, more people used it. That is obviously desirable. It now seems that the Government is suggesting that is not the case or that there is not an evidence-based approach that suggests that lower fares allow more…

I move: That leave be granted to introduce the Road Traffic (Amendment) (Jax’s Law) Bill 2026. Earlier this year, Deputy Emer Currie and I met with two women who had direct experience of losing a pregnancy as a result of the criminal activity of another person, namely, dangerous or careless driving as the case may be. This Bill is named for Jax, a baby who was never born. His mother and father, as the Ceann Comhairle mentioned, Saoirse Aylward and Nathan Murphy, are in the Gallery, as is Colleen Langan, whose aunt,…

I move: "That the Bill be taken in Private Members' time."

Broadly speaking, I welcome the Bill. I have heard what other Members have said about it, and I have some sympathy with the idea that it is a modernisation of Garda powers. It is necessary for us in the context of how technology and possession change to have regard to what powers gardaí need to do the job they need to do. For example, in the case of legislation that had previously been introduced to empower gardaí to demand passwords and access to those phones and things like that, I have misgivings about them but …

There is little doubt about the positivity we associate with membership of the European Union. Some 82% of Irish people favour membership of the European Union, the highest rate of approval of any European state. However, a lot of people talk down the European Union in the public discourse, suggesting that it is somehow a bad thing or that it does not do things the way they would want it to. I would join with them on certain matters. No multinational organisation like the EU is ever going to be perfect. It will nev…

I acknowledge all of the factors the Minister of State set out. I welcome them all and it is really important that we spread that message. The second part of the Minister of State's response is really important and that is the EU jobs part. I would not necessarily limit it just to the European Union. There are other international institutions within Europe where there is a transmissibility between them and the European institutions. As Chair of the Joint Committee on European Union Affairs, I visited Luxembourg ear…

Cuirim fáilte aireach roimh an mBille seo. Níl mé cinnte go bhfuil gach rud atá sa Bhille i gceart. Tá roinnt fadhbanna agam leis freisin. I give a cautious welcome to the Bill. I recognise what it is attempting to do but I want to raise a couple of issues with the Minister of State. The first one is something I raise in general about legislation, which is a drafting issue. It is not specific to planning legislation. When the Bill becomes an Act, if a citizen tries to read it, almost every single section describes …

I might start by recognising a very strong European who was a former Member of this House and who passed away on Monday. David Andrews was a TD for Dún Laoghaire and was somebody who showed on a number of occasions as Minister for Foreign Affairs his commitment to the European project and his commitment to the ideals of Europe. He is a great loss. I wanted to pay tribute to him. I have not had an opportunity in the House to pay my respects to his family, to his wife Annette, his sons David and Barry, and his daught…

I was going to say I welcome the Bill, but I do not welcome it; it is a necessary evil. Its purpose is to secure the provision of energy to this country in the long term, at a time when the provision of energy and resources to generate energy are tremendously volatile and precipitous in terms of our access to energy. I listened to Deputy O'Gorman say security of supply should be achieved by domestic generation. I would fully agree with that statement, but for the fact that we are not capable of generating everythin…

I thank the Minister for coming in to take this issue. It is important, particularly in this week of Pride, that we acknowledge there are still issues concerning the LGBT community and the confidence it might have in the prosecution of offences or the following up of allegations related to events that clearly have a hate motivation to them. In June 2024, when I was a Senator, I raised an issue in the Seanad about two young men who were pursued through Phoenix Park with hammers and knives and who were very frightene…

I thank the Minister and appreciate the acknowledgment that this behaviour is ongoing. It is important to say clearly that there is a problem. I also appreciate what the Minister said about the legislation that was passed and commenced in 2024. However, I am not convinced that it is sufficient. What it does is to give greater discretion to a judge to consider a particular hate element to be an aggravating factor. There is certainly a part of me that would have thought it should not have been necessary to put that i…

I am very pleased to be able to speak on this issue. It is hugely important. There is so much to be said about Pride and the importance of expressing pride and of facilitating that expression of pride but I will focus on two particular issues. The first is conversion therapy, which is not banned in this jurisdiction. This practice is there to "convert" or "cure" people of their sexual orientation or gender identity, or tell them that it is wrong, and essentially convince them of the opposite. It is appalling. The U…

I welcome the Bill. Regulation in this space is perhaps more important than any other regulatory Bill we will pass in this House this year. Any new technology poses problems, difficulties, challenges and threats and, undoubtedly, that is true of artificial intelligence. It does not mean we cannot regulate to protect ourselves and it does not mean we cannot put measures in place to protect ourselves and our children. There is a concern about the notion of over-regulation, that we will therefore stifle innovation or …

I broadly welcome this Bill. It is, however, correctly contentious and controversial in circumstances where we as a country and as a planet face an extraordinary challenge in terms of reducing emissions and dealing with the consequences of climate change, which we see today as we all schlep around here in suits, sweating. I do have reservations about the de facto setting aside of the climate action legislation in the context of this removal of the cap, and also later this week in the context of the gas reserve Bill…

The terrible thing about this subject is that it comes down so much to economics and it should not. It should come down to individuals and everything that we can do for them. I want to echo what many speakers have said in this debate about how we need to accelerate the progress in relation to the provision of treatments for rare diseases. The fact that they are rare diseases should not mean that people do not have access to the treatments they need. I have listened to some of the comments on how we need to have a p…