What are the Minister’s plans to introduce measures to reduce cost-rental rents? Will he make a statement on this because cost-rental rents are too high and are locking thousands of people out of the rental market? The average rent for a three-bedroom house in Oscar Traynor Road is now €1,800. More and more applicants are being refused on affordability grounds. There are flaws in the model, which I will go into in my supplementary questions.

I thank the Minister for his response. There are a couple of questions I want to ask. Has the Minister any plans in relation to all the fragmented subsidies that exist, like those related to the secure tenancy affordable rental investment scheme, STAR, and cost-rental equity loan, CREL, and the local authority funds. Does he have any plans to merge these? I also want to ask about barriers to delivering cost rental at scale and whether consideration is being given to extending the repayment period of the CREL loan. …

To push back on that a bit, while cost-rental rents are somewhat lower, being on average about 30% lower than rents in the private rental market, they are still far too high. A market rent in Dublin of €2,300 still means €1,725 a month. Will the Minister consider the length of time AHBs have to repay the CREL loan? That will answer some of the issues they have. Furthermore, will he consider decoupling our cost-rental model from the open market down the line and tying it entirely to underlying financial costs of del…

St. Vincent's special school in Lisnagry, County Limerick, has been without a routine dental service for months. It has been the bones of a year. The specialist dental post is still vacant. These are students who cannot tolerate routine dental examinations. There is a student who cannot attend school at the moment because she has large cavities in her back teeth, and she has to get these teeth removed. The waiting list for Nenagh is over a year. A lot of these children are on restricted diets. I have been in contac…

First of all, I thank my colleague and party leader, Deputy Bacik, for bringing this Bill forward. I also welcome the visitors to the Gallery. This Bill is timely for two reasons. It is timely because it addresses one of the most disgusting and hideous aspects of our shameful past, namely, the abuse perpetuated by religious orders and facilitated by the State. Many religious orders hold substantial wealth, particularly in terms of property and land, yet many refuse to engage and refuse to pay compensation for the h…

I welcome the visitors to the Gallery. As others have said, I pay tribute to Deputy Ward on the work he has done. Last October, my colleague, Senator Nessa Cosgrove, and I went to Donegal to visit some of the people who are affected by this humanitarian disaster. I thought I knew about defective concrete and that I could quantify in my head the actual scale of the humanitarian disaster but I cannot. I cannot help thinking, every time I think of defective concrete, of putting my hand on someone's house and feeling t…

I welcome the visitors to the Gallery. First of all, it is a real privilege to be a gay man because you are navigating a world that was not built for you. I think most LGBT people have a heightened sense of empathy because you know, for example, that many people around the world do not have the human rights which many of us - including myself, as somebody who is privileged enough to live in Ireland - take for granted. There are so many countries around the world where it is illegal to be gay. It was illegal to be g…

Furthermore, I look, for example, at Belong To and the work it has done, and the 87% of teenagers who have received online harassment for being LGBT. I can even look at my own social media. Any time I talk about any of these things, I get a plethora of stuff underneath the posts and, to be honest, it is horrible but it does not particularly bother me because I know there is some young boy or young girl out there in this country at the moment who probably thinks they are better off being dead than being LGBT. The fa…

Keep it relevant to the Bill.

I told you to keep it relevant to the Bill, Deputy.

You might stick to the Bill.

Ag bogadh ar aghaidh go dtí Páirtí an Lucht Oibre, glaoim ar an Teachta Ahern.

"Certainty, clarity and stability for the rental sector" were the words of the Minister for housing when he introduced his disastrous rental reform Bill in February. He did mention the word "eviction" once. As predicted, this new law has caused carnage in the private rental sector - not stability, just chaos. There were over 7,000 notices of termination in the first three months of the year. That was a 51% increase on the year before. It is the highest level of evictions ever recorded. There are record and ever-gro…

The Tánaiste said local authorities cannot be trusted or depended on. That is an outrageous statement. It is the centralisation of power in the Custom House that has weakened the ability of councils to build new homes, prioritise children in homelessness and tackle dereliction. The measures the Tánaiste spoke of regarding security of tenure are completely undermined by the market rent reset mechanism baked into the legislation which allows landlords to reset rent to the market rate in between tenancies, exposing re…

I congratulate the Minister of State on her appointment, and that is probably where the good news ends. I am very disappointed with the Government's amendment. In fact, I found parts of it quite laughable. "Sustainable data centre development" almost sounds like someone coming along 30 or 40 years ago and saying that we need to move sustainable smoking, and that if a person smokes a packet of Marlboro Lights, it is not as bad. It is not just about electricity, water and carbon emissions. We have seen that data cent…

Hear, hear.

Hear, hear.

I raise the ongoing issue of the future long-term funding for the network of live-monitored CCTV cameras in Limerick. I understand this was raised at the mayoral forum recently. In light of the total Garda budget of €2.74 billion, the funding shortfall here is €880,000. I know that the Department of justice cannot fund this directly. Would the Taoiseach support the Garda to fund the local authority to ensure that this service continues in the context of the overall Garda budget and the NDP investment? If this servi…

It is.

I thank the Minister for her statement. I want to be constructive in the time I have. I welcome the fact that we, belatedly, have an occupied territories Bill. I rise here with my colleagues in the Labour Party to be critical of the Government for failing to include services because I personally feel, and we in the Opposition can feel, almost by extension, the orange fingerprints of Donald Trump all over the exclusion of services from the Bill. There has been so much economic scaremongering and attempted bullying c…