The Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth is working on a range of new equality strategies. The Deputy will be aware that the national action plan on racism has already been published. Work is also being done on a migrant integration strategy, a Traveller and Roma strategy, a new national strategy for women and girls, and the process of developing a new migrant integration strategy will begin soon. The Catherine Day report is a very good report. She and her team did some excellent work…

-----international protection applicants would arrive every year. The world has changed since then, but it remains our policy that we want to move away from direct provision. The Minister is developing proposals for a dedicated migration agency and more State-run facilities; we have some already. The number of staff has increased by 250. There are 250 additional staff in the Department and more are sanctioned. We are also doing a lot of work to speed up decision-making. We need to make sure people who come here, ap…

I can absolutely assure the Deputy of one thing: there will be a further increase in the weekly pension. That will be in the budget. The exact amount has not been decided yet. That will have to be discussed between now and October and will have to be seen in the round with other things the Government wants to do. There will certainly be another pension increase. A decision on that will be made at budget time, as it always is. I would have to read back on what was said in 2018 and what is in the programme for Govern…

I will have to double-check that but it might not be the case. Obviously, it is the programme for Government from 2020 that applies now and not things from previously.

There is a difference between something being proposed by a Minister or Department and an actual Government decision or commitment. Again, I will come back to the Deputy on that. The Deputy made some fair points in her remarks but it was only one side of the story. She mentioned the €12 increase in the weekly pension payment, which came into effect in January, but she did not mention the expansion of the fuel allowance to 70,000 lower income people who are pensioners, which has helped a lot of pensioners to get the…

I will. That sounds like a roadmap for reform as opposed to a Government decision, but I will not get technical about the differences.

I will check it out and come back to the Deputy about it. When we assess things such as payments as a percentage of median income, we do not only take into account weekly payments. We also take into account supplementary payments such as the fuel allowance and other payments. Total income is not only what people get every week. It is the total income over the course of the year.

We would certainly include everything in any benchmarking exercise. What have we done already? We increased the weekly pension rate by €12, expanded the fuel allowance to approximately 70,000 more pensioners, gave a €600 energy credit to every household and made one-off payments last autumn, at Christmas and in spring this year. That is a lot and we will do more in the context of budget 2024.

I thank the Deputy for raising the issue of housing and I want to report some encouraging news on housing to the House. In recent days we received from the Central Statistics Office, CSO, the housing commencement figures for April so we know that the number of new homes that started construction in April was 10% higher than in April of last year. Just since New Year's Day, more than 10,000 new houses and apartments started construction in Ireland, and I am increasingly confident that we will be able to meet, if not…

Different rules apply in different areas for different reasons because we have different local authorities. There are also areas that are under special amenity area orders and areas that are under urban pressure. I do not want to come back to the Deputy with an inaccurate response. There are different rules in different places for different reasons. The Minister of State, Deputy O'Donnell, is the Minister of State responsible for planning. I will ask him to come back to the Deputy directly over the course of the we…

I thank the Deputies. With regard to TBESS, approximately 30,000 businesses qualify for that scheme at the moment. They are all over the country. Many of them are SMEs and many have employees. Helping with their energy costs, of course, does not just help the businesses and their owners, it also helps their employees and assists in reducing and managing inflation. It is just the extension of an existing scheme for a couple of weeks until the end of July. We do not think it merits a specific debate. As Deputies will…

-----but there are aspects of it that go too far, particularly if it comes to taking agricultural land out of use for food production. In urban areas, there are issues where it might become harder, for example, to turn a grass pitch into an all-weather pitch. There is a long way to go before this regulation is right. Negotiations are ongoing. I encourage people to engage in the debate next week in a productive way and suggest how the legislation can be improved and what compromises can be made in order that it is f…

I thank the Deputy. I had a chance to meet briefly with Prime Minister Sunak in Iceland last week and we discussed this matter. We will meet again next week at the European Political Community summit in Chiinu. We will be working together to do all that we can to ensure the assembly, the Executive and the institutions of the Good Friday Agreement get up and running again. The Deputy knows as well as I do that the rules allow the two major parties, Sinn Féin and the DUP, to block that from happening. The DUP are cur…

I thank the Deputy. I know the Minister, Deputy O'Gorman, and his team, assisted by others, have pulled out all the stops in recent weeks to secure additional accommodation for international protection applicants. The number of people who have not been offered accommodation is around 250. Not too long ago it was over 500. Of course, people continue to arrive in the State, albeit in lower numbers than was the case some months ago. I want to be clear that this is a cross-government effort. It is co-ordinated by the D…

I have heard about the dispute but I do not know the details. We have mechanisms to resolve disputes of this nature. Government offices, such as the Workplace Relations Commission and the Labour Court, can get involved and can hear and assess any complaints.

I thank the Deputy. We have had a reduction in public fares since this Government came to office. That has worked well. We have seen the number of people using public transport increase and it is now above pre-pandemic levels, which is not the case across most of Europe. That has been a successful policy. The National Transport Authority published a new national fares strategy recently. I understand that will simplify the fare structure for the greater Dublin area and should mean lower train fares and bus fares for…

I thank Deputy Farrell for raising this important question. The legislation is relatively new and Coimisiún na Meán and the Online Safety Commissioner are relatively new. I have not actually seen any evidence-based assessment yet as to what the response times are and what they are by company; I would like to see too. My sense is that the legislation is good enough but it is still new and the response from some of the companies is not as good as it should be. It is early days yet.

I will have to check with the RSA but my understanding is it is still trying to find an appropriate site in Drogheda for a test centre. I will double-check that. I know it has hired additional driver testers. There has been about a 30% increase in demand for driving tests so it has hired many more driver testers. We anticipate wait times falling in the next couple of months. That is really important, particularly for people who need to pass their driving test to take up employment or get to college.

I thank the Deputy for recognising the extraordinary work done by previous Governments of all parties that have held government on issues such as our commitment to UN peacekeeping. I really respect the role of our Defence Forces in that regard. Considerable increases in overseas development aid, ODA, have occurred in the past couple of years. I thank the Deputy for those words and assure him that will continue. We have no proposals as a Government to join any military alliance. We will not do that but we will conti…

I propose to take Questions Nos. 1 to 14, inclusive, together. The newly established Cabinet committee on children and education will oversee the implementation of commitments in the programme for Government in the area of children and education, including further and higher education, with a specific focus on child poverty and well-being. The first meeting of the new Cabinet committee will take place shortly. Work has been taking place with officials meeting with organisations and groups ahead of the next Cabinet …