I agree that the Minister and her officials are actively engaged in the negotiation of the CAP strategic plan and want things to start next January. We also know that we need to plan for the future. There have been previous occasions where we have not been ready to go and it may happen again, when everything is not in place. Some companies just will not have administrative funding. Jobs and the continuity of programmes will be at risk. We are running over time, so I will not keep going. I will give the Minister the…

I thank the Regional Group for tabling this motion on mobility and transport supports for people with disabilities. The calls made on the Government and the Minister of State in the motion are eminently reasonable and absolutely doable. The motion looks at specific barriers to mobility and transport that people with disabilities face in their everyday lives. This could be accessing their work, their education, their health needs, their social lives - as I said, their day-to-day lives, just like the rest of us. I li…

Last week, I raised with the Tánaiste the issue of the spate of robberies in rural areas in the context of the vicious attack on Tom Niland in Skreen, County Sligo. Again, we all send him, his family and community our very best wishes as he remains seriously ill in hospital. In response, the Tánaiste said the Minister, Deputy McEntee, had launched the new phase of Garda recruitment. However, the figures from the Garda Síochána website show that between 2010 and 2021, the number of gardaí of garda rank in the Sligo …

I am not quite speaking to an empty Dáil, but anyway I thank Sinn Féin for bringing forward this motion, which contains a number of proposals to tackle the cost of living in the context of institutional investors in the residential property market. All of us in this House would agree that the provision of homes to buy and rent is beyond crisis point. This issue is not new. This crisis has been escalating year-on-year. It is not a crisis manufactured by any Opposition party. It is real crisis for families, individua…

I am sure the Tánaiste is aware of the vicious and shocking attack on Tom Niland in Skreen, County Sligo, when his home was burgled last month. We all send our very best wishes to Tom, who remains critically ill in hospital. Many other burglaries and aggravated assaults never make the news. Many people have contacted me on this issue. For example, a man from Swinford alerted me to the fact that 200 homes were burgled and trashed in two months last year between Donegal and north Galway. As he said, there are a lot o…

As the Minister of State will know, Indecon produced a report on the cost of disability in Ireland at the end of last year. What policies is she putting in place to address the issues raised in that report?

I thank the Minister of State. We are all aware of the extra costs people face because of disability. Some of these are once-off costs and some are yearly but largely they are day-to-day and week-to-week costs. This report mentions everything from housing adaption costs to hearing aids, travel costs, utility bills, home help and so on. There is really good analysis of these extra costs in the report. For example, the extra cost in respect of food is almost 9%. For fuel and light, it is almost 10% and, for household…

This is obviously a work in progress. I will bring two further issues to the Minister of State's attention. The first relates to the Housing for All strategy. Within that, there is a strategy for persons with disabilities. It tells us things like disabled people will be at the centre of decision-making. That sounds fine but the question is how is that done and how is it managed? Does the Minister of State have any thoughts as to how she believes that will work? The other specific issue relates to the ongoing review…

Primary medical certificates.

I want to raise a very difficult issue with the Tánaiste this morning which relates to the overuse of and in some cases addiction to over-the-counter medication, in particular, those medications which contain codeine. The context in which I am raising this is the death of a young 39-year-old woman at Sligo University Hospital just over two weeks ago. That happened because of her addiction to over-the-counter opioid-containing medication. Her name was Laura Newell and her sad and untimely death has been reported in …

I thank the Tánaiste. We all deeply sympathise with the family of Laura Newell. The purpose of this discussion is to ask what can be done about it and how can we prevent it happening again. Her sister talked to me about what happened in Australia. That country banned over-the-counter painkiller medication in 2018 and it has worked for that country. It has not caused many of the problems that the people there thought it might cause. I would like to hear, if not today but certainly very soon, that this Government wil…

Do we have four minutes each?

Apologies, I did not read my emails properly.

One minute each.

It is great to see the Sligo-Leitrim constituency so well represented by Deputy MacSharry and also by Deputy Kenny in raising this extremely important issue. I raised this issue with the Taoiseach yesterday and he agreed it was a hammer blow for the community in Collooney, with a population of approximately 1,700, to lose 80 jobs. It is a massive blow to the workers, their families and the surrounding community. We can talk all day about how bad it is. The question is what will be done about this. Perhaps one of th…

I have listened to what the Minister of State said. She talked about the pipeline for jobs in Sligo remaining strong. However, the statistics show that is not the case. In 2017, the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation released a document looking at figures from the 2011 and 2016 censuses. This showed the lowest increase of any county in the country, 2%, was to be seen in Sligo. The national increase was 11%. It is not just Sligo. The surrounding counties, Leitrim, Roscommon and Mayo, had the second, third…

I am happy to see this Bill reach the floor of the House because it is crucial that our legislation underpins and supports our modernised and vastly changed higher education system, our students who are in that system and all those who work in it. I also want to refer to the fact that yesterday we passed the Technological Universities Act, which approves the merger of Galway Mayo Institute of Technology, Letterkenny Institute of Technology and the Institute of Technology Sligo to form the Atlantic Technological Uni…

I raise the shock announcement of the loss of 80 jobs at the B. Braun facility in Collooney in County Sligo. This is a hammer blow for the workers, their families and the entire community in Collooney, which is about 1,700 or 1,800 people. B. Braun has said it will retain a specialist research and development unit in Sligo so this may present an opportunity to resource and grow the research and development part of the business. There are also opportunities with linkages to the new Atlantic technological university.…

Last week, during Questions on Promised Legislation, I emphasised to the Tánaiste the need to ensure that Sligo Airport in Strandhill is included in the new tender as one of the bases for search and rescue services. At that time, the pre-tender notification stated a minimum of three bases. In his response he said: "I can say what we expect to be the outcome." He also said that the outcome would be that there will continue to be four bases and he named Sligo as one of them but he also said that there is a contractua…

In June 2020, then Minister for Communications, Climate Action and Environment, Deputy Richard Bruton, said that "All counties will see premises passed in the first two years and over 90% of premises in the State will have access to high-speed broadband within the next four". That would be mid-2024. If we talk about 90%, Leitrim County Council has confirmed that more than 90% of Leitrim properties requiring intervention in the national broadband plan will not be connected until 2025 or 2026. I looked at the figures…