I will be happy to come back to the Deputy in detail on the specific projects he raises. I know from my visit to west Cork in the past couple of days there has been huge investment in the area. The Deputy knows in the town of Bandon the amount of work that has been done to install flood relief. We all remember the floods in Bandon. Under the previous Government and this one, millions of euro have been invested in flood protection works. Also in Bandon, I saw the work being done to upgrade the main street. I think a…

I think I answered that comprehensively yesterday. The allocation for the project is €1.433 billion. That allocation was made in 2018 and has not been increased since. It will cost more than that, as I said in the Dáil yesterday. We cannot say how much more it will cost at this stage because we are disputing the multiple claims for more money made by the contractor. It is clear it will be significantly in excess of €1.433 billion.

I do not know the amount of the request.

You can ask him.

I am happy to rephrase if it is helpful. If I said "plenty" or "lots of", I am happy to use the term “some”. I was specifically asked about cases of people in emergency accommodation for several years. I know some of those cases because I am trying to help those people. In some cases, people have been offered accommodation and have turned it down. There are people on the social housing list who have been offered accommodation and have turned it down. Sometimes they do it for very good reasons, and I acknowledge tha…

This is something we are working on, both in terms of funding in the short term for emergency works that need to be done in relation to fire safety and a wider scheme, which will require legislation and which we will put in place to help people who need defects in their apartments repaired. That will be done with retrospection.

I am not quite sure if that was a question. I think it was the CEO of ESB not Irish Water. I cannot see the photograph from here so I may be wrong.

I will check up on that issue for sure.

I thank the Deputy for raising issues relating to Western Care Association. The HSE, in conjunction with the board, has in recent months commissioned a service-improvement programme. It will address all the HIQA recommendations which have been accepted and, indeed, welcomed. The Government is committed to providing services for people with disabilities which will empower them to live their lives, provide greater independence in accessing the services they choose and enhance their ability to tailor the supports requ…

I am very sorry to hear that that gentleman received such a big bill. There are a number of options. One is the one the Deputy mentioned, which is to pay the bill over a period by instalments. Another option is to contact the community welfare officer, who may be able to make an exceptional needs payment in that scenario.

We are experiencing a lack of taxis not just in rural areas but in urban areas too, particularly at evening time. The matter is raised a lot. I am sure there is more we can do to encourage more people to get into the industry and to take up the business of becoming taxi drivers. I do not remember the exact detail of proposal of the former Minister, Mr. Daly, but I will look at it again and see if it may still have merit.

I thank the Deputy for raising the really important issue of road safety. We need to remember that the roads belong to all of us, not just motorists but also cyclists and pedestrians. It is worrying to see the number of injuries and fatalities happening on our roads. I will certainly speak to the Minister of State, Deputy Chambers, the Minister, Deputy Ryan, and the Garda Commissioner about that.

My understanding is that money has been allocated this year for emergency works where fire safety is an issue. I will have to double-check with the Minister, Deputy O'Brien, the amount and how it can be drawn down. Realistically, I expect that it will be next year before we will have legislation on the scheme, but if we can do that sooner, we certainly will. This is an issue the Government is seized of and concerned about. In my constituency, unfortunately, a very large number of people are affected by buildings wi…

No part of the country is entitled to any particular amount of money. It depends on the projects and other factors. I will certainly look into the data. I do remember looking at some similar data in the past, but those data did not include projects of under €20 million or the national broadband plan, and it is not right to exclude those things because often it is the projects under €20 million that really add up: the schools, the sports capital and so on. The same thing applies to the national broadband plan. The D…

In May 2014, a report of the Government-established non-statutory inquiry – the Guerin report – was published and was critical of Mr. Shatter’s conduct as Minister for Justice and Equality. The Government acknowledges that Alan Shatter's conduct as Minister was subsequently vindicated by the O’Higgins commission in its report, which was published in May 2016. Moreover, in legal proceedings that culminated in a decision of the Supreme Court in February 2019, it was found that Mr. Shatter had not been afforded fair p…

Regarding the number of people who are in emergency accommodation, we do collect numbers on how many are in domestic violence refuges and so on. Those numbers are available. When it comes-----

I will stand corrected if we do not, but we certainly know the number of places available in the refuges. I do not know how we could collect numbers on how many people are couch surfing, for example, but it is the case-----

-----that the emergency accommodation figures are only people who are in State-provided emergency accommodation. On nursing, what can we do? As the Deputy knows, we are increasing the number of nurses employed in the health service all the time. I think we have about 6,000 or 7,000 more nurses and midwives working in our public health service than we had three years ago when this Government came to office. We are improving pay levels, having an agreement on pay with nurses. I imagine we will have another one, which…

I propose to take Questions Nos. 1 to 5, inclusive, together. In the past ten years, the Department of the Taoiseach has incurred expenditure of €3.7 million on advertising with RTÉ. The bulk of this expenditure relates to Government Information Service, GIS, campaigns in 2020 and 2021. All expenditure is placed through a media buying company procured through an Office of Government Procurement framework. The role of the contracted media buying company is to ensure value for money and the most appropriate media are…

On the points raised by Deputy Boyd Barrett, we spend money on public information campaigns around housing and homelessness and are going to spend more on them. There are a lot of Government schemes available to help people with housing but people are not always aware of them. It will not be done through my Department but, rather, is being done through the Department of Housing, Planning and Local Government. There is information relating to the help-to-buy scheme, for example, to make people aware they can claim b…