Wake up, woman, wake up.

You know this very well of course and you driving your diesel-guzzling van outside. You drive your diesel-guzzling van every day of the week. You forget that.

You should be ashamed of yourself.

You could not respond to her.

Go out to the van and drive it home full of diesel.

God almighty.

I wish Deputy Calleary the very best in his new role as Minister of State. I do no doubt his capabilities and he was an excellent choice. The purpose of this Bill is "to provide for a process to allow for certain transactions that may present risks to the security or public order of the State to be reviewed by the Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment". IDA Ireland reported that 249 new investments were won in 2021. Of that, 161 were North American, 68 were European, and 21 were from countries classified as…

I will not be able to keep going for that amount of time. There are two other speakers coming like a train behind me. The Online Safety and Media Regulation Bill 2022 has the potential to create a level of accountability that is sorely needed. According to the Children's Rights Alliance, however, critical measures are needed to ensure the legislation lives up to its name. The Bill envisages the appointment of an online safety commissioner and the creation of a new media commission with the power to fine non-complia…

I would like to speak to this amendment. Of course, the discussion is mainly built around electric cars. We have 50,000 electric cars in 2022 and the target, to the best of knowledge, is 850,000 by 2030. Everybody else in the world knows that is not achievable. Most likely, by 2030 anyway, they will be in the dump heap and most people will be told to go back to some other forms of transport. On a private note, and I very rarely use private conversations I had with the Minister, on one occasion the Minister asked me…

Yes, because it is said that that is the way forward. Thank you, a Cheann Comhairle, for your clarity on the matter. The fuelling turns out to be electricity, if the Government has its way, and the points for plugging in the vehicles are not in rural communities. I live on Mizen Head and I know how long it takes to travel to the Dáil daily, or maybe once or twice a week sometimes, and I know for a fact that if I were to depend on an electric vehicle, I would not be here serving the people. The fuelling of vehicles,…

I am absolutely appalled. It is obvious the Deputy did not have much time on the local authority to be able to understand the hard work councillors do and the time and effort they put into county development plans. If the Deputy’s amendment is accepted, although it looks like the Minister and the Government will not accept it, it would take a lot of powers away from the local authority, which is an appalling attack on the local councillors who work tirelessly. Some of the amendments, let us be honest, are as good a…

Yes. That is what I am saying, that this amendment will be withdrawn and I am pleased that is the case. The Minister said-----

We hope that is the case. If not, we will certainly vote against it. We cannot support a situation where a local authority spends months or perhaps even years putting together a county development plan that would not come into effect if it did not tick the box of a Deputy here or that we would bring forward legislation to make sure it could be overridden by appeals to An Bord Pleanála, which is questionable in its own right. This is a serious attack our democracy and on our local authorities and councillors who wor…

-----with people basically going broke in their homes. As I said, the amendment slightly erodes democracy when it is looking to override county development plans, override the local authorities and override what councillors and staff have put time and effort into making sure it is right. This is something I will not be supporting in any way, shape or form.

This simply is not working. The Minister of State will probably say that he was going to stand up and say that anyway. However, I know that it is not working on the ground. The people of my constituency are telling me that retrofitting and the warmer homes scheme are not working. The funny thing is, if we go back 15, 16 or 17 years to when the Government rolled out the scheme initially and it was done through community alert schemes, it delivered. I was on the community alert scheme at the time; I was not a politic…

Last week's recommendation from the Mental Health Commission to drastically reduce beds in Bantry General Hospital's mental health unit from 18 to 11 is a huge retrograde step for mental health services in west Cork. The hospital covers a population of 180,000 from Castletownbere to Kinsale, as well as parts of Kerry. Following its inspection in 2019, the Mental Health Commission found the unit in Bantry to be 88% compliant and recommended investment be made. It was the same in 2021 when the unit was again found to…

We only have hours to save the beds.

The question here is whether An Bord Pleanála is fit for purpose. Is it just another quango of politically-appointed cronies on excessive salaries acting unlawfully and costing the taxpayer millions in legal costs? Why would the Minister allow An Bord Pleanála to carry out an internal review, which in other words means it is investigating itself? How much did the senior counsel Remy Farrell probe into An Bord Pleanála's costs? Cork City Council, Kerry County Council and South Dublin County Council have all passed m…

This commission was established in June 2015 to investigate certain transactions, activities and management decisions at the IBRC. The report of the commission of investigation on the transaction in relation to Siteserv and principles and policies within IBRC on the interest rates was published by the Taoiseach on Wednesday, 7 September 2022. I ask the Ministers of State what has changed today. There is no accountability in the banks. Will it take seven years to get answers from this Government to what happened in …

The crisis this country finds itself in is mainly down to bad Government decisions. The Government has gone to lengths to blame everyone but itself through this recession. The Rural Independent Group has been warning of this shocking recession coming. Instead of taking fast action, the Government has thrown gallons of petrol on the fire. The carbon tax that was heaped on the people of Ireland was completely supported by Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, the Green Party, Sinn Féin, the Labour Party, the Social Democrats and t…