I thank all the Deputies who spoke in support of this motion and also those who did not speak but who I know support it. Regardless, I am very disappointed by the Government’s response. I know I am not alone and that I speak for tens of thousands of disabled people when I say it is a great shame that the Government has not sought to support them adequately this winter. The Minister spoke of a supplementary welfare scheme totalling 3,000 recipients in 2025. This motion affects ten times that number, namely 310,000, …

I welcome the opportunity to speak about infrastructure in the House and that the Government has made time for this debate. This was a huge issue during the general election. It came up at door after door in my constituency. I will start with a history lesson. Between 1831 and 1834, within three years of the idea being mooted, the world’s first commuter train line was built between Westland Row and Dún Laoghaire. Running through my constituency, it cost between €6 million and €7 million per kilometre in today’s ter…

A public building has been vacant in my constituency for several years. I would like to know what the Government is doing to rehabilitate vacancy across public agencies, with value for money at the core of that. In October 2025, I asked Transport Infrastructure Ireland about a 125 sq. m vacant kiosk at the Ranelagh Luas stop in Dublin 6, to which it replied the long-term use was still being considered and it had no timeline for that use. It confirmed to me last week that it was requesting €500,000 from the National…

Is two years acceptable?

That is fine.

I would like to echo Deputy Murphy's call to reduce the time requirement for the wage subsidy scheme. The OECD published a report not too long ago saying that 10% of the working-age population had a disability and 25% of people with disabilities in 2019 were unemployed. It is the largest employability gap in the developed world and is higher than the United States or the United Kingdom. Dr. Mel Cousins from Trinity College said that income from employment would be the best way of tackling poverty for people with di…

That is what the OECD said.

To come back on those figures briefly, the Minister referred to just under 100,000 employers having signed up to the scheme and over 700,000 participants. This gives me a sense that the average number of employees per business that has signed up is about seven. I would like to get a sense of whether the Minister has an understanding of the spectrum of sizes of employers and the number of employees per employer that have signed up to the scheme. Is it disproportionately small businesses, for example, or retail and h…

An average.

I have been speaking to a lot of disabled people over the past few weeks about their experiences and on this question of a cost-of-disability payment, permanent or otherwise. Some of the stories they told me were that they were using only one heating bar on their electric heater rather two because they could not afford the cost of electricity, that they were going in for central dialysis in a hospital because they could not afford the energy costs of doing it at home thus increases the risk of hospitalisation and t…

It is profoundly wrong to chase a defenceless animal to exhaustion and have it ripped apart by dogs and call that a sport. It is a barbaric and cruel practice that has no place in a modern society. It is a throwback to empire. It is a loathsome practice. Those are not my words. They are the words of backbenchers from Sinn Féin, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil. Those words ring true and matter. They should be reflected in votes. Tonight, in an act of indifference or cruelty, it appears those backbenchers will come into th…

Yesterday, the Taoiseach did not answer my party leader, Holly Cairns, on whether an emergency winter payment for people with disabilities would be provided. Instead, he said the Government wanted to embed permanent changes to payments, but it has not done that either. The Government has instead slashed the income of some of the most vulnerable people in this country by €1,400 before those permanent supports were ready. It has also plunged more disabled people into poverty to face a grim Christmas. They are already…

So, he is ruling it out.

This will be real change.

It is often said that a dog is man's best friend. In Ireland, we are no different. Who of us do not remember the old stories of Cú Chulainn, who was named after the hound, or Fionn mac Cumhaill and Bran? There are nine Irish breeds of dog, the most famous being the wolfhound. We have a proud and long history in our mythology and society of a wonderful relationship with dogs. Unfortunately, we also have a history of cruelty to animals in this country. Less than six months goes by in any year, and we hear of some con…

I was genuinely shocked and appalled by the video that was circulated by the Department of housing yesterday. It was drafted by a charity, as we know, but it was released on the Department of housing's official communication channels. It actually beggars belief that some bright spark in the Department of housing came up with releasing that video. Is it now official Department policy that young people should move in with their parents to have housing?

Is that the official policy of the Government? The numbers have doubled in a decade and the Government still wants them to move in with their parents. Youth unemployment among the highest it has ever been, if you strip out Covid and the recession. What is the official policy of the Government for housing for young people?

It was released by the Department.

I really like numbers. I look at numbers all the time. There are approximately 750,000 people who are about to go on auto-enrolment in January, approximately 1.5 million recipients of social protection payments and zero offshore wind farms in this country that are operational. A magic number I just discovered is minus €250. The reason I really like numbers is that they often bring clarity. Politics is too often the opposite of mathematics. It is often too much about obscurity and opaqueness; telling people we are d…

Households.