I also welcome the opportunity to speak on this Bill. Insurance companies have ripped off the public for too long. The insurance sector made profits of €142 million last year, yet premium prices kept increasing. This Sinn Féin legislation would force insurance companies to pass on savings to their customers and reduce premium prices as a result of new personal injury guidelines. A recent survey by Sinn Féin found that 58% of respondents had seen their premiums increase. This is despite the new guidelines. Our legis…

I wish to ask the Minister the number of completed connections made under the national broadband plan in 2020. I know he will not have complete up-to-date figures for 2021, but even indications of how the programme is going would be of use. The Minister knows how important this is for jobs and balanced regional development and in the context of increased remote working.

I thank the Minister of State for his reply. If I heard him correctly, he stated that 220,000 premises had been passed. Will he clarify that figure? Some 115,00 premises should be connected to high-speed broadband by the end of 2021. Some 544,000 premises are included in the national development plan, with between 70,000 and 100,000 premises to be passed each year thereafter. I welcome that the primary schools programme is being rolled out quickly. I understand that 679 schools will be done by the end of 2022, whic…

I thank the Minister of State for clarifying. However, my question was on the number of homes connected. Some 115,000 should be connected by the end of 2021. From the Minister of State's answer, I understand that a small number of houses are starting to be connected. That is welcome. In my constituency, some 12,000 people commute out of Laois every day, which is unsustainable, and more than 7,000 commute out of Offaly. Nearly 20,000 people commute out of both counties for work. We need to get more people working fr…

No, that was it.

I welcome the opportunity to speak on this Bill. When these measures were last before the House in October 2020, Sinn Féin tabled an amendment to limit the scope of the emergency legislation. We sought for the Government to bring forward less discretionary legislation which did not avoid Dáil scrutiny. The existing legislation is giving far too much discretion and emergency powers to the Minister for Health. I am not saying he gets pleasure out of implementing these measures and I understand difficult choices have …

I raise with the Minister the driving test backlog. There are 12-month waiting lists for driving tests. I understand there was a safety issue with physical driving tests at the height of Covid but as we emerge from the pandemic, the Minister needs to provide staff to catch up. Approximately 100,000 people are waiting for driving tests. The Road Safety Authority sought 80 extra driver testers and I understand 40 were provided. Perhaps the Minister will confirm that. This is holding people up. The suspension of the t…

When will we see action on these very difficult issues?

The State has a responsibility to call out the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands and the system of apartheid that that has been enforced for over five decades. The world has looked on in horror at the barbaric violation of the basic human rights of Palestinians by Israel. The Israeli military onslaught has driven Palestinians out of their homes in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and forced them into the open-air prison that is Gaza where missiles recently rained down on top of innocent men, women and…

On page 47 of the programme for Government, reference is made to improving public health, focusing on primary care. Dental services for medical card patients in the county I come from, County Laois, have collapsed. There is no service for adults in Laois. Only one dentist operates under the dental treatment services scheme, DTSS. I have a list that we rang around earlier in the week to see if we could get anyone. We have been at this for weeks to see if we could get dentists to take it. Only one is dealing with exi…

Very briefly, one sentence. There is no dental scheme for primary school children. I raised this with the Tánaiste seven years ago when he was Minister for Health.

They are in secondary school and are 14 years of age before they are seen. It is third world country stuff. I appeal to the Tánaiste to bring this to the attention of the Minister for Health and to try to get it dealt with.

Like other speakers, I welcome the Bill introduced by Deputy Barry. We are emerging from a global pandemic. As the economy recovers, we must take a fresh approach to workers' rights. After decades of workers' rights being eroded by conservative governments, we need to ensure that in the 2020s workers' rights are at the forefront once and for all. Previous speakers referred to how during the term of the previous Dáil the Clerys workers were left high and dry after the company went into liquidation. We were promised …

I welcome the opportunity to speak on this very important motion. The Government has failed to grasp the scale of the housing and rental crisis and properly regulate spiralling rents. It has failed to provide affordable rental homes on a scale required across the country and has provided none at all in counties Laois and Offaly. Despite the Covid crisis, rents in Laois are up 3.4% in the past 12 months, with an average cost of €754 per month for a one-bedroom flat and €964 for a three-bedroom home. Offaly has seen …

I welcome the opportunity to speak on the Climate Action and Low Carbon Development (Amendment) Bill 2021. We have to get to grips with the issue of climate change. That is beyond doubt. How we do it is the question. We have to become carbon neutral by 2050. We have to decarbonise. We accept the cessation of commercial peat harvesting, but this has been a big hit to the economy and jobs in the midlands. There is also a ban on domestic turf cutting. For some families and households, jobs have been lost and their soc…

The legislation brought forward by Sinn Féin this morning is very important and will deal with a significant problem that has caused hardship and stress for families in my constituency of Laois-Offaly and other rural counties from where people must travel. Recent reports estimate that 3,019 students from County Laois and 2,984 from Offaly attend third level college. Many of these students have to secure rental accommodation in Limerick, Galway and Dublin as there is no third level college in the constituency. Tradi…

I welcome this opportunity to raise the issue of the vaccine roll-out. If we are to emerge from the pandemic in any sort of efficient or timely manner, we need to significantly increase the supply of vaccines. Sinn Féin has called on the Minister to raise the matter with the European Commission and to put pressure on it to be more proactive around approving other effective vaccines. Other countries are doing side deals while the Government sits on its hands. Germany has done a deal with Pfizer, as has Denmark. Aust…

I want to refer to the national broadband scheme. A problem arises whereby people are in neither the intervention area nor the blue area. The blue areas are the areas that are supposed to be serviced already by existing companies and networks, such as the metropolitan area networks. The problem is that the maps show households and businesses that are supposed to be in the covered areas, mainly on the edges of villages and towns. I have constituents in Laois and Offaly who cannot get a broadband service from a priva…

I welcome the opportunity to address this issue with the Minister of State. It has been the case for many years in Laois-Offaly that there have been long waiting lists for services such as child psychology, speech and language therapy and occupational therapy. However, the situation is now truly awful and this is not all due to the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. Action is needed now to deal with the backlog of children in these two counties who have been waiting for several years to access these services. It is a…

In the ten years I have been raising this issue, this is the first time that I have had some hope. It seems that, as the Minister of State outlined, the Department has intervened and that she has taken it up with the HSE. Sometimes we raise such issues in the House and express our concern and so on, but we do not get firm answers. The Minister of State, however, has outlined some reasons for hope in respect of recruitment to the disability services. She referred to the recruitment of clinical psychologists and stat…