The Tánaiste has said that people want certainty around the new investment accounts and that he wants more young people to get into saving. That includes the tens of thousands of ordinary people who get up early in the morning to go to work. Some of them, luckily enough, have been able to put savings into vehicles like exchange-traded funds. At present, those people are taxed on eight years of those savings, even if they have not sold a thing. They are taxed on something they have not sold as a capital gain. The De…

I thank the Minister of State for his response. I am not sure who wrote it, but it appears to have been a civil servant who does not understand rural Ireland and has not walked in the Minister of State's constituency or in Cork North-Central, which is mine. The Minister of State talked the big talk about energy security, yet this Government and its predecessor, in which he also served, stopped exploration for oil and fossil fuels. He talked about energy security as a benefit for people who were struggling. There ar…

Some of us have deeper voices than others.

Further to the revelations in today's newspapers to the effect that doctors are looking for an outright ban on scrambler bikes, despite the fact that we have new laws coming in, it has emerged that 1,100 children have attended hospital on foot of e-scooter injuries in the past five years. There have been 59 serious injuries, some involving organ displacement, have been reported. This House needs to have a debate on that matter.

There is a growing call for a public inquiry into the handling of protected disclosures in An Garda Síochána and I support that. However, I believe it must go much further. The concerns around protected disclosures seem to extend to the public service, An Garda Síochána, the Prison Service, the HSE, financial services and beyond. I raised this matter previously in the Dáil, and my party raised it in a Private Members' Bill, to strengthen protected disclosure protections for whistleblowers, which was rejected by the…

I welcome the Bill. We have to talk about carbon tax. It punishes those who have the fewest choices in society. It punishes the families living in rural parts of Cork whom I represent. It punishes families at the lower end who cannot afford retrofitting. There is not much comfort in retrofitting when a person has to pay €18,000 for panels and gets €1,800 back from the Government. Some people in this House say that retrofitting is fantastic, but many people in the constituency I represent, which stretches from Balli…

I thank the Minister for her reply but, with respect, it did not answer the question I asked. I did not ask whether she is committed to equality. I asked for the mechanisms. When a policy or recommendation is made by the Department in the name of equality, what is the actual process for checking whether it takes the rights away from somebody else? In my question, I named women, children and girls. I do not have to look very far for an example of that. We can go back before the summer recess. I trust the Minister is…

The Minister did not answer my question on whether she read the book or not, but she made the statement, in respect of those types of book, that her Department has nothing to do with it. This may come as a surprise to her, but she is the Minister for children and equality. These are recommended books describing sexual acts to 15-year-old children. If the buck does not stop with her, as the Minister, where does it stop? Where is the mechanism that protects those children? That is what I am asking about today. The Mi…

That is unusual.

The taxpayer pays for a special rapporteur on racial equality and racism. The job is to bring communities together. Instead, the person holding that office has told the Irish people that her group has "inherited this island" and will define its future. Let me be blunt: that office is funded by the public to reduce division instead of inflaming it. If another State appointee had made those comments, this House would be in uproar and answers would be demanded straight away. Does the Government still have confidence i…

While modernising police legislation sounds reasonable on paper, this Bill fails to strike the essential balance between public safety and fundamental human rights. It dramatically expands invasive powers such as stop-and-search and seizure of electronic devices without introducing necessary binding legislation with safeguards. Crucially, it lacks mandatory requirements to record ethnic or demographic data during those stops. Without this data we cannot properly monitor or prevent the biometric profiling or disprop…

I thank the Tánaiste for the 21-page document. He talks a very good talk in that 21-page document but the reality is that his actions do not match it. This is a sticking plaster on a broken leg. That is what the Tánaiste is doing here today. That is effectively what it is. Some 500,000 in this country are in energy arrears. Some 18,000 are in homeless accommodation. Grocery prices are up by 4%. The Government is recalling the Dáil and the Tánaiste is telling us he is planning for the future. This is a six-week defe…

It is impossible. Shame on you, Tánaiste, and shame on your Government.

Like many of the stories the Minister of State has heard today in the House, it is not strange that we have constituents coming to us regularly saying the biggest fear they have is the postman's knock. When they get the criteria for what is needed for their children to start the school year, those include €700 laptops, €600 iPads, tablets or something of that format as well as signing up to a Microsoft programme that has been selected. Despite your household perhaps owning a Microsoft programme, you have to buy int…

I am sure the Taoiseach will join me in welcoming Christy Hussey and Conor Burke to the Public Gallery. Since this morning, a 15-year-old child has been sitting in protest outside the gates of Leinster House. Cara Darmody is highlighting the fact that the State breaking its own law. I refer to the law which states children's needs must be assessed within six months. The law has been broken for 20 years. On the Taoiseach's watch, the number of children involved has gone from 15,000 to 22,000 children. How can people…

I will say what half of this country is thinking and what this House has refused to hear: women in Ireland do not feel safe walking through the capital city, through Cork city, where my own constituency is located, or through towns and villages where women once thought nothing of walking home alone. That precious ordinary freedom has been taken from the Irish woman. It did not happen by accident. It is the result of policy. Eight women have died this year. Of the identified suspects, one is Irish. That is not an in…

I will try to stick to the subject as much as possible. Europe has achieved a great deal through co-operation, helping to promote peace, expand trade and tackle the challenges that no country can solve alone. We owe a great deal to Europe when it comes to that, but the co-operation works best when respect for the independence of democracy is put above the member state. Most European citizens, and certainly a lot of Irish citizens, see a tremendous disconnect between Europe and themselves. People see European legisl…

The public service pay agreement expired on 30 June with no successor in place. SIPTU has now announced that it may ballot over 80,000 members for strike action across the health, local authority and education sectors. The Irish Congress of Trade Unions, ICTU, public service committee has said that it has no basis for any formal talks to begin. Unions have pointed out, and rightly so, the inflation at 3.6% in May, which has already wiped out the 1% increase from February and the 1% increase since June. As the Minis…

I thank the Minister for his reply. I have had relative success in business throughout my years. I can confidently say that if I ran my business the way the Government is approaching these negotiations, I would probably be out of business today. That is the reality. As I said, we are now seven days after the expired deal. We should have been at negotiation tables about six months ago to ensure a smooth transition, particularly when this country - with great gusto as the Government has said - is supporting the Presi…

The universal social charge, USC, remains one of the most resented charges on a worker's payslip. It cannot be reduced by tax credit. It hits the middle income and lower earners at the first euro. As the Minister is aware, it was introduced in 2011 as a temporary crisis measure. Fifteen years on, it is still here. It is still squeezing the workers it was meant to support during that downturn. Previous Ministers have claimed that USC must be in place because we need the revenue. Is the Minister aware that of the €14…