On 17 May, Leonard O'Brien, a two-year-old Irish child, was taken forcibly from his mother's arms in the French city of Antibes by French gendarmes who arrived at the door unannounced and armed. The genesis of this is an action taken by Ms Sarah Jane O'Brien, who hails from County Clare. Her ex-boyfriend took an action under the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction. The child was taken from its mother. We cannot cast this aside as a civil custody case or a civil matter. This is sta…

I welcome today's debate on the IBRC Commission of Investigation report. It is a 1,500-page report but I am not going to pretend I have read it. I know others have done so but I certainly have not read it. I have read summary reports of it and it has been well documented in recent days. It goes into great detail on the Siteserv transaction, making extensive findings of fact. The Government accepts the findings of the commission and believes the report shines a light on unacceptable practices by certain parties duri…

The example the Ceann Comhairle has given is perfect. Seven or eight months before I was elected to this House, when I was a teacher and a county councillor, I went down to the INTO credit union, of which most teachers are a member, to raise a loan to improve the family car. I could not get one, despite having a good income. I have no qualms about saying that I had two incomes. I worked damned hard but I had to go to the bank of mom and dad in my late thirties to get a car and set up a standing order to pay mom and…

I welcome Elaine Dunne, Connie Hannon and Fiona Bowe from the Federation of Early Childhood Providers who are in the Public Gallery. The early childhood care and education programme, ECCE model of childcare was introduced in 2010 and it was replicated on the basis of the Northern Irish system. Since 2010, the capitation funding per child in ECCE has risen from €64.50 to €69. This is measly when compared with the doubling of capitation funding in Northern Ireland in that same period. Budget 2023 has to ensure that c…

What is Sinn Féin doing in the North?

Will they stop objecting?

We are.

Fewer objectors.

Have they Deputy Wynne's vote?

Where is Deputy Wynne? They lost her.

I thank the Minister and the Minister of State, Deputy Niall Collins, for attending. Can the Minister detail progress on supporting students with disabilities to access further and higher education? Can he also provide an update on the new national plan for equity of access to higher education?

I thank the Minister. That is a positive reply. It is good to hear that the targets are being met and are being exceeded. I agree with him that the outcomes are completely crucial to this. I know of a cohort of students who recently completed a programme in the new Technological University of the Shannon: Midlands Midwest. It has been absolutely fantastic. An element of equity in accessing education is the hardship fund provided at third level. Officially it is known as the student assistance fund. In the past acad…

I thank the Minister. That is positive. At a recent meeting the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Education, Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science discussed prisoners, another group of people who sometimes enter further and higher education through a different pathway. I made the point that in the United States surveys by Ohio University have identified that up to 40% of inmates accessing higher education through the prison service have learning difficulties. We have no empirical evidence in th…

If diagnostic testing could be started in the next year it would be great.

I think this question is the most important of the oral parliamentary questions today. On top of everything Deputy Boyd Barrett said, my worry is that there are many accommodation centres, particularly in the mid-west, that also have Ukrainian refugees staying in them now. The capacity that they would have had in the previous academic year is now virtually gone. I am glad to hear the Minister will entertain the idea of institutions finding on-campus solutions. However, I do not think enough is being done in that re…

I wish to ask the Minister, Deputy Harris, if he has intentions to expand the availability of places in third level courses that provide training in the realm of educational psychology.

The housing crisis can only be fixed by building houses, the hospital crisis can only be truly fixed by more hospital beds and, indeed, the incessant problems we are having with children waiting for diagnostic tests and psychological screening can only be rectified when NEPS and the child and adolescent mental health services, CAMHS, have an adequate capacity of educational psychologists. It just struck me many times over. When I was at Mary Immaculate College, there was a course, a bachelor of education in educati…

I thank the Minister for his reply. There are two parts to this problem. The first is that we are not churning out quite enough graduates. However, more importantly, those graduates who emerge from these courses are not going into educational psychology. Rather, they are back down in classrooms. It makes no sense for someone with an educational psychology qualification to be filling out a referral form for somebody to NEPS, which will not see them for a year or two. That is absolutely illogical. There needs to be a…

All politics is local. Please forgive me for raising an issue related to my local GAA club, Meelick GAA club in south Clare. I played with the club, very poorly, for many years. The club has put a request before the Minister’s Department to purchase a piece of State-owned land located at the rear of its stand. This land is not being used for any purpose. It is rough pasture. There was a donkey on it the last time I was down there watching a match. Can the Minister please sign off on the proposal? They want to buy i…

That is an awful thing to say about a GAA player.