I thank Senator Ardagh for answering the question. It does not go that far. When reading it on Sunday, I was a little bit worried about the engagement with agencies. Perhaps there is an explanatory note somewhere stating that nothing should preclude a person from voluntarily giving the information. We need to be careful on the operation of it, so that employment agencies can function. I have worked with the recruitment industry, so I can see things like that being involved in it. Anything that brings us closer to t…

The Minister of State is very welcome. It is very pleasant to see a Minister of State from the Department of Health responding to a health matter. I am very grateful for that. We have been here since June 2020. In December 2019, the then Minister for Health, Deputy Harris, and the then Fine Gael Deputy for Dublin South Central and former Minister of State, Catherine Byrne, announced the commitment to the Drimnagh primary care centre at the Mother McAuley site in Drimnagh and gave great promises of what would be inv…

I thank the Minister of State. She paints a fabulous picture of what the Drimnagh primary care centre will look like and it will have incredibly valuable services. My problem is that there are no dates in respect of it and the day when a resident of Drimnagh walks through the doors of that primary care centre could be ten years away for all I know. She mentioned preliminary reports and strategic assessment reports but how long do they take? What is their purpose? I say that as someone who does not understand what t…

I will begin by echoing Senator Ward’s call for a debate on the report published by the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Disability Matters this morning on aligning disability services with the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, UNCRPD. It is a really in-depth report and an awful lot of work went into it. I am proud to be a member of the committee that produced it. Some very stark points are made in the report which we need to take on board and explore further and there is nowhere better than th…

I pay great tribute to Senator Ruane and all the work she has done. She and I are both chairs of drugs task forces. I asked her for a reading list of things she thought I should be educated on to make me a better chair of a drugs task force. She led me down a route that has been fascinating and very educational. I read In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts by Gabor Maté. I also read The Social Distance Between Us by Darren McGarvey. A full chapter of that book analyses the cause of drugs and looks at the concurrence of soc…

I extend my support to the gardaí who were under siege by a gang of youths in Ballyfermot. I am very grateful to the Minister for Justice, Deputy Harris, for having an immediate meeting with me yesterday in response to that and to discuss what is going on in the community, as he continues the work the Minister, Deputy McEntee, began. I am grateful we are bringing in higher penalties and longer sentences for people who attack front-line workers. It behoves us as a parliamentary community to support the introduction …

I apologise, a Chathaoirligh, but I need to finish this. St. John's Ambulance is reliant on donations. It does not get anything from the State, which is more the pity because we could possibly stop it if that were the case. It gets money from the IRFU, the FAI, the GAA and the St. Patrick's Festival for providing volunteers. Those organisations now need to suspend that funding until such time as this report is published.

How can they use the services of an organisation that is failing to publish a report and show immediate, urgent action on historical child sexual abuse? The delay speaks volumes. I thank the Cathaoirleach for his indulgence.

I welcome the Minister and thank him for taking the statements today. I have thought long and hard about this debate. We need to broaden it out by addressing the various reasons that people come to Ireland. I would like to mention something that struck me before today’s debate. Last week, we had the announcement of where the Ministers and Ministers of State will travel to promote Ireland and Irish issues for St. Patrick’s Day. That is a valuable economic gain for us as a country, as well as an inward investment in …

I did not need to wear a hat to get my surname said correctly. I thank the Chair. I thank the Minister of State for this legislation and for all the work he has done. I will come back to that in a moment but first, I particularly welcome the guests in the Gallery today. I begin by welcoming Lord Iveagh, Ned, and also the friends of the Iveagh Markets: David Delaney; Noel Fleming of Noel's Deli fame on Meath Street, which is really good for jammy dodgers as well as ice cream; James Madigan, Kim Olin and Kieran Doyle…

I will raise two matters. One is very close to the Deputy Leader's heart and relates to the motion she tabled. It concerns the publication of the St. John Ambulance report regarding sexual abuse in that organisation. I pay tribute to Mr. Mick Finnegan who today is on day 11 of his protest outside the St. John Ambulance headquarters. I intend to go there shortly to support him. He is a fantastic advocate. It is very brave of him to speak, to do so publicly, and to stand firm in the face of absolutely appalling intra…

We need to have a debate on how we deal with that. A former journalist is putting out a newspaper on a regular basis that is full of lies and misinformation. We seem powerless to stop that. This is having an effect on people who do not enter into such information with critical thinking asking what the agenda is, how this is truthful, and what it actually means. It is infecting communities where there are fears. I want us to have a debate on how we deal with that.

Well done.

I, too, welcome the Minister of State. He is a very good and diligent colleague, a very hard worker for our party and was also very good to me when he was Chair of the Committee on Transport and Communications, which I commend him on. I am about to have a hissy fit and it is not personal. Deputy O'Donnell is a Minister of State at the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage and this is a matter about families and it is under the Department of Health. It is outrageous the Department of Health saw fit to…

As a colleague, I know that if the Minister of State stands here and says he has made the phone calls and gives that reassurance, I know that he has. I am grateful for that. However, there are other concerns here. For example, the position paper approved by the Cabinet talks about application to the High Court for retrospective surrogacies. The regulatory authority would also have to be established. If that is what we are looking at my daughter, who is now almost eight, will be ten or 12 at the rate at which this i…

I rise to praise Michael Lanigan of the Dublin Inquirer for an article being run today on the cromlech, or dolmen, in Chapelizod. This is one of the oldest pieces of evidence of people living in the Chapelizod area. It dates back as much as 3,000 years. It was repaired in the 1970s because it was damaged. At that time, people were a little vague about what was urgent, what was important and what constituted heritage. We had Wood Quay and all of that. In reply to a parliamentary question tabled in 2006, the then Min…

I take Senator Higgins's point and support my colleague, Senator Currie, who has done an awful lot of work on this. Employers have a right to offer contracts with terms and conditions that exceed statutory minimums. They cannot contract people out of statutory provisions but they can always give more than is statutorily required. I disagree on one hand in that I believe employers can put in whatever working arrangements they wish. I see the "shall" in the Bill as being restrictive with regard to whether there is re…

I commend my colleague, Senator Martin, and thank him most sincerely for the opportunity to be a co-sponsor of this Bill. It is incredibly important that a complainant in a case of coercive control not be cross-examined by the person she is accusing. It runs contrary to the very definition of coercive control that it could be perpetuated within the applications in respect of domestic violence. Having reflected on Senator Chambers' comments, I completely endorse and support them. Ms Noeline Blackwell has been absolu…

l raise an issue in respect of which Senator Ahearn campaigned all through last year in order to make sure that the product in question was on the funding list. It is now on the funding list but it may as well not be. The provision is completely impotent. I refer to the alleged reimbursement for Cariban. This product is for women who suffer severe illness and vomiting during pregnancy. The condition for its reimbursement under the scheme is that it must be prescribed by a consultant. However, the reimbursement is s…

I thank the Minister of State. With due respect, putting the onus on drug companies to make the application when they are part of a for-profit industry - and let us be very clear about what it is - is absolutely farcical. It is not a patient-led response nor is it a citizens-of-the-Republic-led response. The fact is that what we are about is deferring the risk and the legal burden onto a practitioner or a consultant. The person who pays the cost in the middle of that is a woman who either does not get her prescript…