I very much welcome this Bill. It is long overdue, as we badly need to have a statutory regulatory framework for home care support in this country. There is a glaring need to have minimum standards and a licensing regime for providers. Others have referenced the scandal we saw within the nursing home sector last year and in many previous years. We do not really have any idea of the quality and standard of the much-needed care that is taking place within peoples' homes. This Bill will, for the first time, allow for …

I apologise. We all understand if there is an informal arrangement in place for looking after a relative or a neighbour, where it is only one person, but it is a business if a person is looking after three or fewer clients. I do not want us to be in a place in a number of years time where we are talking about the disaster of not regulating these entities. We are talking about people's lives. We are talking about people in a very vulnerable situation. In some situations they may not have very strong family support o…

I am very glad we are having this debate this evening. I pay tribute to Deputy Rice and, indeed, all our fellow members of the health committee in quite an unorthodox way of keeping the heat and light on this issue. There are ultimately a very small number of families affected by this but the impact of the lack of a comprehensive legislative framework has a profound impact on their lives. They are facing into yet another year of ambiguity and uncertainty in their families' lives. I am painfully conscious that there…

The Labour Party welcomes and supports this Bill to ban single-use vapes. We also want to make it clear that this is one small part of an overall jigsaw that is required in a public health and environmental response to vaping. There has been an explosion in the number of people vaping over the past decade. There are figures reporting 7% of adults and 16% of 15- to 16-year-olds are currently vaping. The Lancet back in 2023 reported that in 2015, 10% of young people were vaping and now that is up to 30%. Any of us wa…

I thank Sinn Féin for bringing forward this motion. I stand here frustrated that we are having this conversation at all. We should be spending time talking about improvements to the health service but instead we are talking about a service that is effectively going backwards. The reality is that when we were talking about the community pharmacy agreement in October in this House, I raised issues about phased dispensing and blister packing. There was no action from the Minister or her Department. It is only when upr…

The poet, Michael Hartnett, has a special place in my heart, not only because of his poetry but because his maternal home place in Camas, outside Raheenagh, is a part of the world that I know very well. When the Minister was launching the Éigse Michael Hartnett Literary and Arts Festival earlier this year, he acknowledged that there is a need for capital funding for arts in this country. The Limerick Leader reported that he said he wanted to help to develop arts centres, theatres and other artistic infrastructure a…

Answer the question, please. The Minister is so dismissive.

The Department has been approached. There was a letter.

I am working on the basis of what was said to The Complex.

I think this is the third time this week that I have risen to talk about support for arts and cultural spaces, not only here in Dublin but across the country. Since I came into the Houses five years ago, and I am sure Deputy Boyd Barrett is the exact same, I have spoken out about the closure of arts spaces and studios, particularly here in Dublin, because the reality is that culture cannot compete with capitalism. We have seen a hollowing out of arts and culture spaces across our city over the past two decades. We …

What screams back at me from this reply from the Department is that there are no ideas about how to support and secure the future of a place such as The Complex. There is a fobbing off or passing the buck to the local authority. A capital scheme was referenced in the reply. Anybody who has any notion about any of our communities across the country would know that €300,000 was totally insufficient to allow any local authority to go and purchase space. There is certainly great frustration on my part. The Minister, De…

I very much thank Deputy Cullinane and Sinn Féin for bringing forward this very important Bill. I express real disappointment that the Government is opposing this legislation. We have to be honest here. As recently as September, the Secretary General of the Department of Health talked about the Department remaining committed to achieving the Sláintecare targets of ten weeks for outpatient appointments and 12 weeks for inpatient and day-case procedures. We all know, however, that unless someone's feet are held to th…

My question is on that same topic because I understand the Minister attended two meetings with both members of the board and management of the Complex, along with the former Minister, Paschal Donohoe, over the past number of months. He is obviously very familiar with the situation. The Complex's ask is very simple, in that it has secured funding from DCC and it has a loan but the third part of the jigsaw is securing funding from Government. The reality and the context here is that for the past 20 years, we have cou…

I suspect I will be raising a lot of the issues Deputy Whitmore raised. I am coming to this from a position of enormous frustration because of the lack of co-ordination and planning within the Department of education in tandem with the Department of Health over many years. The parent notify system, in theory, is great. I know the date was, of course, brought forward this year to allow both Departments to be able to plan for the future. I very much welcome it. However, the actual process is failing a number of famil…

I thank the Minister of State for that. We all appreciate the expansion in the number of places but the reality is that there was a time when Ministers here would get up and say that one did not need an assessment of need and that the education system did not need a diagnosis to provide additional support. Of course, that is the case for special schools but what we are seeing now is a potential deepening inequality between families. One of the families that approached me could not afford to go private for their chi…

I move: That Dáil Éireann: recalls that it is now a decade since the passage of the Gender Recognition Act 2015; notes that: — trans healthcare in Ireland is consistently ranked as the worst in Europe, with over 2,000 people on a waiting list for healthcare; — stories from transgender people constantly highlight how Ireland's flawed healthcare system is not working, with invasive and insensitive scrutiny from the current National Gender Service; and — the previous Programme for Government committed to a stronger mo…

This is disgusting.

The Deputy has time to speak to the motion.

The Deputy has time to speak to the motion.

Great.