I am sure Deputy Leddin will adequately speak about Limerick. I will focus on a Waterford example, specifically the IDA Ireland business park there. There are a number of bus routes that drop people off at the Cork Road and the quality of the service is pretty good. However, if a person is headed to the premises of Sun Life, which is a massive employer, or Teva or Bausch + Lomb, or to Waterford and Wexford Education and Training Board to do a retrofitting course, you could be 1.5 km away when you alight at the bus …

The Minister might be interested in looking back on the discussion I had at the education committee this week. We had the forward planning unit of the Department of Education in and I raised the example of Ardscoil na Mara. It is a pretty hostile environment for pedestrians and cyclists. It is set up for vehicular traffic. There is a role for the Minister's Department and the NTA to sit down with the Department of Education and make better planning decisions about how we situate our schools and how we use them as s…

I was at the national ploughing championships last week and I was challenged by a man. It was a very interesting discussion and proof that real humans are much nicer than Twitter humans, if we needed such proof. He challenged me on the restriction on the burning of turf and smoky coal and questioned whether it was a green issue or a health issue. I very strongly made the case that it is both and that one does not need to be exclusive of the other. We know the implications of burning fossil fuels in general, be it t…

I thank the Minister of State for taking my question. I am going to start with something that has become a common refrain in this Chamber by saying I am disappointed the senior Minister was not present to take the question. While I understand the Minister of State is very competent, this particular issue lies outside her competence in terms of her ministerial duties. We must face up to the fact that although we might not have an exceedance of the EU limit, this is not the limit we are aspiring to. We are aspiring t…

Amendments Nos. 15, 17, 18, 20, 51, 159, 171, 172 and 195 are related and will be discussed together.

Amendments Nos. 25, 26, 71 and 72 are related and may be discussed together.

Amendments Nos. 27, 186 and 187 are related and may be discussed together.

Amendment No. 30 cannot be moved because amendment No. 29 has been agreed to.

Amendment No. 34 has been ruled out of order.

Amendments Nos. 35 to 39, inclusive, are related and may be discussed together.

I will start as other Deputies did and offer my condolences to the family of Dollceanna Carter and my sympathies to the 19 families affected by what is detailed in this shocking report. Every parent in Ireland was stopped in their tracks by the emergence of this news. When you find yourself ending up in the care of our health system, even if it is just a run-of-the-mill referral to hospital or passing through a maternity ward, there is a handing over of trust on entering into that system. We step into an environmen…

After many years of campaigning by local campaign groups and, to be fair, due to a consistent cross-party effort by Oireachtas Members here in the Dáil and elsewhere, we finally have the bricks and mortar of the second cath lab delivered on the site of University Hospital Waterford, commissioned and up and running. The people of Waterford are now asking for an expansion of the services and, particularly, an expansion of the hours of service. Will the Minister of State let us know what progress has been made in that…

I thank the Minister of State. As she said, any of the Members here from Waterford could have written that response. The Minister, Deputy Donnelly, was down with us relatively recently when he opened the state-of-the-art palliative care facility on the University Hospital Waterford site. The Minister gave a commitment then that in a short frame of time we were going to move to a seven-day-a-week service from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Everybody in Waterford and everybody in the south east has a heart story and has the friend…

While none of us would think it is the cardiologists alone who are required for the staffing, they are absolutely pivotal and we know they are like hens' teeth. We need to get those posts approved and we also need to run the recruitment campaigns for those cardiologists because without that we cannot provide the service and we cannot roster for that expanded service, which is exactly what we need. The issue of dedicated recovery beds is also pivotal. We want to be able to provide that service. We know that space ac…

Covid is still with us and we are still learning about the virus all the time. We are learning about how it is turning up in people's heart muscle and how it is crossing the body-brain barrier. If you have met somebody with long Covid, as I am sure the Ministers of State have, you will know they look absolutely the same. They look in the full of their health. Despite this, they are managing their energy from day to day. I wanted to ask the Minister specifically about dedicated services to address long Covid in each…

As the Minister of State read through that list of hospitals, she knew that as a Waterford Deputy, I was going to get up and point out that 600,000 people live within one hour of University Hospital Waterford, and yet no long Covid services are provided there. I have been dealing with a number of people through my constituency office and, to be quite honest about it, with a number of people in my family and the main message I am getting is that they do not feel they are being believed because they outwardly look pe…

While you should never base policy on anecdote, I was speaking to my local GP, who said that one in six of the people turning up to his GP service are there because they are suffering from long Covid. People do not have a fixed diagnosis or sheet of paper saying they are suffering from long Covid. There is a need for that piece around self-reporting, and maybe even a public awareness campaign on that to build a better picture of what is happening there, and then pathways to reach those services that are needed for …

I have the South East Technological University's, SETU, strategic plan for 2023 to 2028 in front of me. There are ten individual references in that plan to the enterprise quarter, which was being co-developed on the old Waterford Crystal site, as the Minister knows. What engagements has the Minister had with SETU about the development of that enterprise quarter? When can we expect to see detailed capital plans? It is all well and good to have the physical site available but we need to build on it.

I thank the Minister. I know he has a very developed understanding of just how totemic and important that site is for telling the tale of Waterford and for the rejuvenation and revitalisation of Waterford. It is extremely important that we see this site signed, sealed and delivered. We will then begin to see serious capital investment flowing on it. We want to see things like student accommodation available on-site within SETU, on the Waterford campus. We have a proven track record of same. It is an interesting pro…

I referred to the fact that it is referenced on ten specific occasions in the strategic plan. Strategic objective 3.1 is to "Establish the new and dynamic University-Enterprise Quarter on the Waterford Crystal site as a focal point for the SE Innovation Region." It is of critical importance. I will cast the net a little wider, since I have the opportunity. Enabler A in the strategic plan is to complete a "masterplan for SETU for the coming two decades and deliver new physical infrastructure to sustain and increase …