In response to the Minister of State and with all due respect, as this reply was presented to him by the HSE, that is farmyard manure because it does not address any of the issues that I have raised with the Minister of State here. I have given a week's notice on this specific issue. In relation to all of these therapies, all the private providers have been back delivering these exact same services, and charging for them, for months at this stage, but not the HSE staff. With all due respect, 50% of the staff have n…

The Army stands available to do this. Its personnel are the ones who should be used.

The Government has allocated €10 million to the coach industry, which is very welcome. The fund is to be distributed via Fáilte Ireland. To date, however, not one cent has been allocated. The private hire market has completely collapsed. There are 1,700 operators in the country employing 11,500 people. The aforementioned fund is equivalent to €870 for each of those employees. This is insufficient to deal with the specific problem that the industry faces, an industry that normally carries approximately 75 million pa…

To synopsise what the Minister has just said, if you are not a licensed bus operator providing a licensed service, if you are not contracted to Bus Éireann, then there is nothing for you. As the Minister knows, the NTA has washed its hands of the industry outside of the licensed sector. I wrote to the Minister and the NTA in August regarding the private school bus operators who had not received even a single sheet of paper on how they should operate their services from 1 September in order to meet the Covid-19 crit…

The reality is that the taxi, chauffeur-drive and private school bus operators have been completely ignored by the Government to date. Five weeks ago, I wrote to the Minister regarding the private school bus operators but he has yet to respond to me. These operators do not come under the remit of the Department of Education and Skills, which is only interested in those that are contracted to Bus Éireann. In fact, private operators that are providing private services had to borrow copies of the documents that were c…

I am sharing time with Deputy Tóibín. I welcome the opportunity to speak on this Bill. I want to put on record my acknowledgement that the Minister has remained in the House for the totality of the debate. I commend him on that because it does not often happen. I know it is difficult to do with the pressures of time under which he is working. Uachtarán na hÉireann, Mr. Higgins, has said that serving men and women have a right to expect an income that provides for themselves and their families. Several speakers have…

The Minister has answered 28 Oral Questions since her appointment, not one of which has been in relation to carers. Carers are the backbone of our health and care system. There are over 4,400 full-time carers in my constituency of Roscommon-Galway and the vast majority of them have faced significant additional burdens as a result of Covid-19. It would be a terrible thing if their plight was not raised directly with the Minister in advance of the budget.

I must say at the outset that I am specifically talking about situations where the people who are being cared for are in day care, in a training centre or in school. I accept that the amount of hours per week has been increased. I welcome it and supported the Minister's predecessor, former Deputy Regina Doherty, on moving it from 15 hours per week up to 18.5 hours a week. That is to be commended. The Minister says the reason for doing that is to ensure the care recipient's requirement for full-time care is balanced…

We need to address anomalies across schemes and this is one such anomaly where it is 18.5 hours for carers and 19.5 hours for the community employment and rural social schemes. Having said that, for the specific cohort of people I am talking about, the person who is being cared for is not in their home - they are in day care, a training centre or school. If one takes the example of a disabled child who is in primary school, the child is out of the home for a minimum of 5 hours and 40 minutes every single day. That …

This question also relates to carers. The income disregard for the carer's allowance was consistently increased during the 2000s and there was a policy decision to try to make as many people eligible as possible. However, in the last 12 years that income disregard has not been altered whatsoever. The failure to expand the disregard means that families on the average industrial income are now precluded from accessing carer's allowance.

I am not comfortable with the phrase the Minister used about this being the most generous income disregard. It is but there is good reason for that. The reality is that every person, particularly an older person, who is kept out of a nursing home saves the taxpayer between €600 and €800 every week. If it is a child or adult with a profound disability, the savings are multiples of that on a weekly basis. If the income disregard was increased in line with the increases in the minimum wage between 2008 and today the i…

I fully accept that the focus of the Minister for Employment Affairs and Social Protection is on income support. The reality is that carer's allowance was never designed solely as an income support because of the income disregard that was introduced and the need to try to support as many older people as possible to remain in their own homes and, of course, to support younger people with disabilities. The Minister also has responsibility for rural and community affairs. A broader view needs to be taken of this throu…

The Minister will be sick listening to me.

I welcome the opportunity to speak in this debate. I tabled a parliamentary question earlier in the week regarding an issue I raised in the House last week. I refer to the anomaly in respect of the temporary wage subsidy scheme, TWSS. The Minister, Deputy Eamon Ryan, will know that when this was first mooted I argued strongly that we need to maintain the link between employees and employers. The TWSS has been very successful in doing that. I understand the reasoning in moving to the employee wage subsidy scheme, EW…

I reiterate the comments of my two colleagues on the Business Committee, Deputies Kelly and Mac Lochlainn. We had no communication either. I made contact with the Clerk to try to find out what was going on because I was reading on Twitter about what was happening in the House. It is not good enough. I accept that we have three Airí Stáit in the Chamber from the Department of Health. I appreciate and understand that. I cannot understand, however, why we could not have the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marin…

There are over 500 applications currently at appeal stage. We have one individual who has to process each and every one of them. That backlog is leading to a situation where we do not have timber within the industry at present. Will the Minister of State unblock that blockage as an immediate action?

The Minister said earlier that protected geographical indications, PGI, status will not be the silver bullet. It will in fact be the final nail in the coffin if the current approaches continue to be taken to maximise the number of beef farmers eligible for PGI status. It contradicts a motion I put down in the House this time last year, and which the Minister supported, that PGI status should be for certified grass-fed and extensively reared Irish suckler beef. Will the Minister implement that motion, which the Mini…

The difficulty is that the agenda here is to shoehorn as much beef as possible into the PGI status application. As the Minister knows, the former Commissioner, Phil Hogan, said that we should be seeking designation specifically for suckler beef. When I raised this with the Minister's predecessor, Deputy Creed, in the House last October, he said that the concept of suckler beef does not have a high degree of resonance. However, across a range of food products, including dairy, there is resonance in relation to grass…

The Minister has heard that the stakeholders on this side of the House are vehemently opposed to the approach that is being taken which, from its inception, was about maximising the amount of beef that could be shoehorned into a PGI application. The Commissioner at the time said it would be unsuccessful. Unless we focus on suckler beef, that will not happen. The difficulty is that Bord Bia has never distinctly promoted suckler beef because that does not suit the processing industry in this country which wants to ge…

Bord Bia.