Yes.

I raise the issue of University Maternity Hospital Limerick and the long-awaited need to colocate the maternity hospital with the main acute hospital in the region. University Maternity Hospital Limerick delivers excellent care with good outcomes for mothers and babies. However, there is no ICU or blood bank on-site and the building has not changed significantly since I entered the world myself nearly 32 years ago. Much of the focus at UHL is rightly on the acute bed shortages and staff shortages in the UL Hospital…

The Taoiseach is very selective.

Will the Minister confirm whether he intends to review the housing completion target for 2025, how many new homes does his Department estimate will be completed in 2025, what additional measures does he plan to take to increase housing construction, and what engagement has he had with the Departments of Finance and public expenditure on new taxation and expenditure measures to boost delivery?

Regarding targets, there has been a great deal in the news in the past of couple of months, including yesterday, to show that the Government will not reach its stated targets for the next three years. We have 250,000 too few homes for the population and the Housing Commission report is very clear. How does the Minister intend to make sure we reach the housing targets as set out in the programme for Government? I urge him to revisit the targets before 2027. What sort of engagement has he had with the Department of p…

I did not hear anything specific in the Minister's reply in regard to what the Government is actually going to do to get us out of this quagmire we are in. I want to follow that up by asking about apartment delivery. We have a specific issue with apartments. It was revealed this morning in The Irish Times that the croí cónaithe city scheme had only delivered 17% of its target. It has delivered nothing in Limerick, the city I represent. Rents in Limerick rose by 19% last year and Limerick had the largest increase na…

We still have not had a proper rationale as to why the Minister has decided to curtail this scheme. Now that single people are excluded from it, and we know single people are not moving on the housing list at the speed we would like due to the shortage of available units, can the Minister outline what new measures the Government will be bringing forward to stop them from entering homelessness and emergency accommodation? This is a major issue.

I welcome our visitors to the Public Gallery. I thank the Minister of State for his comprehensive response. It would be remiss of me to speak about young carers without acknowledging our 2024 Limerick Person of the Year, Ellen Gannon from Newcastle West who cares for her two brothers, nine-year-old twins Andrew and James, both of whom are autistic. Today we heard very powerful testimony from four young carers, Conor, Lucy, Benjamin and Sarah Ann. I commend them on coming in to speak to us. Young carers exist in the…

Almost ten years.

Hear, hear.

Gabhaim buíochas leis an gCathaoirleach Gníomhach. Ba mhaith liom mo bhuíochas, ar dtús báire, a ghabháil le Páirtí Shinn Féin as an rún seo a thabhairt faoi bhráid na Dála. Molaim agus molann Páirtí an Lucht Oibre an rún seo. The Government's announcement on the tenant in situ scheme leaves more questions than answers. This is a vital scheme to stop even more people ending up in homelessness. The cynical move to put a de facto end to this scheme, by restricting it so much as to make it effectively unworkable, is a…

I very much welcome this debate, which is long overdue. I also welcome the Deputy Browne to his new role as Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage. I wish him well. We should have had this debate months ago, before the election. The Housing Commission's report is as clear as it is stark in relation to the Government's failure on housing. It is abundantly clear that we do need a period of accelerated delivery to eliminate the deficit of up to 256,000 home and that a specialist entity is needed to drive,…

I thank Deputy Coppinger and her group for bringing forward this important motion. I welcome the survivors are in the Public Gallery. They should not need to come here to see this issue addressed. I pay particular tribute to Natasha O'Brien, one of my constituents, for her advocacy in relation to this work. As a man, I am very conscious of the fact that we are the problem because we are the perpetrators of this violence. I am very clear as a white man in a position of enormous privilege that I want to be a positive…

I add my congratulations to the concerto of congratulations. I thank the Minister of State, Deputy Butler, for coming to the House this evening. I am sorry to subject the Minister of State to this at this ungodly hour but let it never be said that she does not work hard. I rise tonight to raise the issue of the lack of a consistent and permanent full-time speech and language therapist, SLT, at King's Island primary care centre in my constituency in Limerick. I do this on the basis that there are 1,257 children in C…

I thank the Minister of State for her reply and I welcome it. The community needs complete certainty as to when exactly this post will be filled because there has been a lack of faith here because the post has been vacant, as I have outlined, for more than three years. It is very clear that the HSE's pay and numbers strategy is not working. Officials in the HSE have told me that they were severely impacted by the moratorium before it was lifted and now, because of the pay and numbers strategy, they are simply unabl…

Hear, hear.

I welcome the Minister of State to the House. It is very disappointing, yet again, that we do not have even a Minister of State from the Department of housing. I tabled a housing motion in the Dáil last week with my Labour Party colleagues. The Minister for housing was, unfortunately, not available last week and did not even have the courtesy to contact me or my colleague, Deputy Bacik, to say he could not come to the House. I understand there was a convention before that when the line Minister was not available, t…

We showed up.

I move: That Dáil Éireann: recalls that: — under Housing for All - A new Housing Plan for Ireland, the failed housing plan of the last Government, a target of 33,450 new homes were projected for 2024 but only 30,030 homes were built, a decrease of 6.7 per cent on 2023, while the construction of new apartments fell by almost a quarter; — the former Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage told the Dáil in October 2024 "I have consistently said we will exceed that target. I still confidently predict … that…

-----throughout this debate to hear this motion. That is very disappointing and if it is a sign of things to come, it is not a way to start off this Dáil term. Nevertheless, I am delighted to move this motion, the Labour Party’s first Private Members' motion of the Thirty-fourth Dáil. This motion calls for and sets out our vision for the radical reset in housing policy as called for in the Government’s own Housing Commission report, which it has, by and large and conveniently for itself, ignored. Ireland is not jus…