I thank the Deputy. We will certainly try to do the right thing by the survivors, taking into account all the issues at play. I think the commission did a good job. It did what it was asked to do, in many ways. It spent five years examining all the documentary evidence, spoke to lots of people who spent time or worked in mother and baby institutions and did its best to come up with a report to a legal standard as to what could and could not be proven and what was and was not said. I do not want anything I say to be…

I cannot make that commitment here but I will take up the matter again with the Minister, Deputy O'Gorman. I do not know if it is possible to retrieve the audio recordings. Knowing the answer to that would be crucial at this point. The commission has said that each witness at the confidential committee was given a guarantee of complete anonymity, and for this reason the tapes were deleted. Recordings, the commission says, were used as an aid to create thematic records of each person's account, from which the final …

I thank the Deputy for his questions. I support the greater use of antigen testing in Ireland. I am on the record as having said that on a number of occasions. However, that has to be subject to public health advice and the approval of NPHET and HIQA, which also advises on this. It is now being used in outbreaks and has been tested in some clinical scenarios, such as outbreaks in hospitals. It has, therefore, been used in recent weeks under direction of NPHET and the HSE. The problem is that it misses a large numbe…

Nobody likes to see a bank branch close in a town. We need to be honest and realistic, however. The world has moved on. The number of people who go into a bank branch now is a fraction of what it was ten or 20 years ago, and the number will keep falling. Most purchases in Ireland now are happening electronically. Even places where a person could not use a card before and where they only took cash, they sometimes now only take a card. Older people, by and large, have adopted and adapted to that change in technology,…

Certainly not, no.

We need to be honest with people about that. One thing I saw last year and was really impressed with-----

The Deputy should have a look at one of the old banks in Edgeworthstown and how that has been turned into an enterprise hub.

I thank the Deputy. I checked before I came into the House and, to the best of my knowledge, NIAC has not yet come back to us on that matter. It is under consideration, however. As we move down the list to more and more groups of people, we have asked NIAC to give consideration to groups that could be prioritised, not just family carers but also people under 70 who may have a medical condition, transplant patients, people who are immunosuppressed, cancer patients and people with cystic fibrosis. There are, therefor…

I do not have any detail on the different pay rates being offered to people who will be working in the vaccination centres, but like I said, we will have a subcommittee on Covid this afternoon and I will take that up with the HSE then.

I am not saying we will not extend it. I am saying that the Minister is giving that consideration. If we do extend it, we want to know that it will serve a purpose and help us solve the problem that has arisen around deleted audio recordings. We do not know if they are recoverable and an answer to that question would be helpful.

A lot of extra staff have been hired and a lot of resources have been provided to schools to adapt to Covid by purchasing screens, sanitisers and all of those things. A lot has been done in that regard. The advice we have from NPHET and our public health doctors and scientists is that schools are safe places but no place is 100% safe. Any place in which people are going to interact carries a certain risk. We have to bear in mind, however, the high risk of denying children and young adults their education, the oppor…

I am told there is no date yet for that Bill but I will take up the matter with the Minister for Finance today when I speak to him. We need to be frank and honest with people. Banks have a responsibility to engage in prudent lending and they should only lend money to people or businesses where there is a reasonable confidence that they will be able to pay it back. The Deputy talked about the banks being helped out in the past and the reason they had to be helped out or bailed out in the past was because they lent a…

Most people do their banking online and they do it on their phones, and one does not need broadband for that. If the Deputy asks around in his constituency and community, people will tell him they mainly do their banking on their phones. Leaving that aside, I will meet NBI in the coming weeks to discuss the acceleration of the national broadband plan. As the Deputy knows, this is a huge investment of €3 billion in rural Ireland. A contract was signed by the previous Government and was opposed by most other Members …

As I said earlier on, the development of a third banking force that is able to compete with Bank of Ireland and Allied Irish Banks, AIB, would be welcome. It is something the Government would support but any decision on Ulster Bank will be a commercial decision for NatWest. With anything we do in trying to put together a third or a new banking force, we would have to make sure that entity would be successful, viable, profitable and in a position to compete with Bank of Ireland and AIB. That would mean taking on the…

I am very sorry to hear what people in Bandon are experiencing. I visited after floods a couple of years ago and spoke to many of the business people and residents. The flood works that have happened there have produced some benefits but the problems are far from resolved. I will certainly undertake to inform the Minister, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, that this was raised here in the Chamber today and ask him or Irish Water to come back to the Deputy with more information.

I, once again, warmly welcome the absolute 180° U-turn by Sinn Féin and other parties when it comes to the national broadband plan. This was opposed tooth and nail when we signed that contract in 2019 and now nobody wants to cancel it. We had all the usual conspiracy theories and all the rest of it about how the contract came about and who got it and why, and how somehow things could be done quicker and cheaper, but they could not say how. I welcome the fact that Sinn Féin has now totally U-turned on this and is no…

I thank Deputy Munster. The Deputy raised this issue last week or the week before. On foot of that, I have written to the Minister, Deputy Foley, and have asked her to take up the matter directly with the Deputy. I do not know the details of the school project but it is important that proper consultation happens with all of the people affected.

As I mentioned earlier, we have asked the national immunisation advisory council to consider that and to give us advice as to whether we could prioritise family carers, for the reasons that the Deputy said, but not just them. We have asked it to consider other groups too, such as those with cystic fibrosis, CF, and people who are immunocompromised, for example, people who have transplants. It would be remiss of me not to raise my concerns here about the commemoration being organised by Sinn Féin in Wexford, in the …

The family do not support it and our Defence Forces-----

Our Defence Forces would be particularly offended that the term "Óglaigh na h-Éireann" is being used in relation to this.