The Minister of State is welcome once again to the Chamber. I will follow up on what Senator Higgins has said about the community model. Many of the points I wanted to make have been touched on, for example with regard to the voluntary nature within our communities. Coming up to Christmas each year, businesses and volunteers in towns give up their time to hang up Christmas lights. They have to pay out an amount of money to insure the public liability for those lights. In order to cut costs, everyone volunteers at a…

I will be sharing time with Senator Joe O'Reilly. The Minister of State is welcome. I echo the sentiments of previous speakers regarding our respect for the job An Garda Síochána does. An Garda Síochána was founded on the vision of Michael Staines, the first Commissioner, that the force would succeed through moral authority as servants of the people. As has been mentioned, we should be very proud of the fact that our gardaí police by consent. That has been their ethos ever since the force was established back in 19…

Hear, hear.

I reiterate the sentiments expressed by Senators Clifford-Lee and Cosgrove on International Nurses Day in acknowledging the contribution of nurses and recognising them as health professionals. In doing so, I must mention that I visited the ambulance service workers on strike in Roscommon town today. They are also out in Boyle and Loughglynn. I respect the job the National Ambulance Service does. Like my colleague Senator Boyle, we have not been quiet in this Chamber about the ambulance service in recent months or i…

Like so many people in this House, this weekend, I will be participating in Darkness Into Light annual fundraiser with Pieta House. It will take place in a number of venues around the country from 4.15 a.m. on Saturday. The idea behind Darkness Into Light is to raise awareness of suicide and mental health issues, remove the stigma of it and bring communities together so people are prepared to talk. Getting more people to talk and engage on the subject is the best solution to this issue. There is an issue with provi…

We support her.

First, I want to acknowledge former Deputy and Senator, Paudie Coffey, who is in the Gallery. Last week, I received a text message that was supposedly from my daughter, telling me about a new phone number that she has. As my nine-year-old and ten-year-old daughters were sitting beside me when I received this message, I immediately knew it was a scam. However, text scams, WhatsApp messages and emails are things we are all experiencing every day of the week now. One in three of the population, or 35% of adults in Ire…

The Minister of State is welcome. The Arbitration (Amendment) Bill is an important step towards enabling Ireland to ratify key trade agreements, including CETA and the EU-Chile agreement, as well as similar arrangements with partners such as Vietnam, Singapore and Mexico. Like Senator Daly, I am not going to go over all the information that the Minister of State gave. However, like everybody in this House, I have received a lot of correspondence in the past couple of days about this arrangement. What the Minister o…

The Minister of State, Deputy Dooley, is very welcome back to the Chamber. Today I want to talk about vulnerable customers and the solar PV scheme for medically vulnerable customers. In January and February 2025 Storm Éowyn hit our country. I do not know whether too many people in the Chamber know that my area was very badly hit. My house was out of power for 13 nights. We have a very old demographic in our part of the country and a lot of these people were on a vulnerable user list. From engaging with these people…

I welcome that 1,900 homes will be included this year. It would be interesting to see how many vulnerable users there are and what percentage we are covering there. One of the people who contacted me about this said it would be great and would reduce their anxiety if they were able to get onto this scheme. In contacting their energy provider to inquire about the scheme, they were told there was nobody internally they could speak to, that it was done on a lottery system and that if they were ever picked, the provide…

I will raise the issue of water safety. We are coming to that time of year when we want the public using all our amenities, our coast and all our lakes, but there is an awareness issue in terms of water safety. There have been 16 drownings in Ireland already this year. Between 2018 and 2022 there was an average of 116 drownings per year. During the previous five-year period, between 2013 and 2017, there were 132 drownings per year. There is a massive issue in terms of people's self-awareness and the awareness of th…

I thank the Minister of State for coming in. Energy security is something we heard all the previous speakers talk about. We generated 33% of our electricity demand last year from wind energy, which is welcome. It shows that some of these schemes are working at the moment. We are familiar with travelling around the country and seeing a lot of windfarms with propellers not moving at any given time. The reason for that is the lack of capacity in our grid. This country spent a lot of money in the 1970s and 1980s invest…

Surprisingly, I was going to raise the same issue as Senator Murphy O'Mahony. Yesterday there was an announcement of a 96% increase of households applying for home energy upgrades compared with the first three months of 2025. That is 29,000 applicants for home energy upgrades. This is on the back of a €640 million investment in budget 2026, €558 million of which is coming from the carbon tax. We have a target of 73,000 houses to be upgraded this year and we are well on our way to hitting that target. There is a cle…

The Minister is welcome once again to the Chamber. As my colleague has said, any motion or arrangement that can promote and enhance the relationship between the police in both jurisdictions must be welcomed. We share the Border and the ferry ports and we must support anything that can enhance the respective police forces' ability to do their jobs. I also note the window for this is 30 April, which is next week, so it is important we deliver this. I am fully supportive of it.

Recently, Senator Boyle gave me one of the reports from the health committee, which did a recent report on dental services. They constitute an issue that I have raised in this House numerous times. We know that we have not been producing enough dentists historically and that we do not have enough dentistry places. Last September, we welcomed the addition of 20 new places, but there is still a lack of places. Only something like 8% to 10% of applicants are getting places on dental courses in Ireland. This is not mee…

I welcome the Minister of State to the Chamber once again. The Commencement matter I present today is in regard to the safe routes to school scheme and it follows discussions with Fine Gael councillors in Roscommon: Councillors Liam Callaghan, Valerie Duffy, Ruth Conboy and Dominick Connolly, about their frustration at the introduction of safety schemes around their national schools throughout County Roscommon. The safe routes to school scheme is one of the most positive and forward-thinking initiatives we have see…

I thank the Minister of State for his response. I believe in the scheme. I welcomed when Ballyfarnon was brought to the design stage recently following an intervention from us in relation to an accident that had happened earlier last year. When it comes to road safety, doing something now is better than waiting years for perfection. Children's safety must come first and while I welcome there are schools that have been introduced, councillors in Roscommon and I are still looking at three national schools on a main r…

On my way to Dublin this morning, I was listening to RTÉ Radio 1. Darren Freehill aired a piece on the Roscommon Community Sports Park group. It was highlighted on the radio that Roscommon is one of only three counties - the other two being Leitrim and Longford - that do not currently have an athletics track. Darren made a recording from a sand track or a sandpit, which I am familiar with because we used to play soccer there 30 years ago. We used to have blitzes there on Tuesdays and Thursdays during the summer. Af…

I find it hard to believe that four weeks on from the initial measures people are still wondering why such a small amount was taken off the green diesel. Some 15 cent was taken off petrol and 20 cent was taken off diesel, but it was from the excise duty and there is only 11 cent of excise duty on green diesel. That is the reason why there was such a small amount. However, that has been addressed, and we always knew it was going to be addressed and monitored as the situation developed. I also refer to Senator Noonan…

Last week, while I was using public transport, a train I was travelling on between Dublin and Roscommon had a small fire on board and had to stop. Too often we come in here and talk about a service not having done its job, but I want to compliment Irish Rail, the fire service, An Garda Síochána and our ambulance service on their quick response. They came to a remote part of east Roscommon where the train had to stop. We all had to disembark from the train and were transported to the nearest train station but it was…