You are not.

I very much welcome the opportunity provided by Sinn Féin to discuss the rise in the cost of living and I thank the party for that. It was put to me in stark terms last night by the outgoing cathaoirleach of Clare County Council that if a single person living alone on the old age pension buys nothing else for three weeks, he or she can buy a half a tank of fuel. That is where we are and this is not sustainable now or into the future. We constantly hear from the Government that we have very close to full employment …

I thank my Independent colleague, Deputy Connolly, for putting forward this motion and bringing focus to the necessity to fully restore respite care. The issue was highlighted during the pandemic. It was one of the many difficulties that were highlighted during the pandemic. Everybody was forced to live together as a family, which was all well and good but brought additional pressures to families without the additional pressures of having to look after somebody who was not fully able to look after themselves. The p…

I have listened to this debate with great interest. It concerns an issue I have raised previously in this House in the specific context of the difficulties of obtaining insurance for the fair on Spancil Hill. Thankfully, through the efforts of Clare County Council’s elected members and management, that has now been obtained, but I thank the Minister of State for his offer and the work he did as well. As it happens, it was not needed this year, although it may well be needed next year and I thank him for his willing…

I again raise the issue of University Hospital Limerick, UHL. On 15 March, HIQA visited UHL to measure its compliance with four key standards. It failed three and was only partially compliant with the fourth. The report found that there was inadequate capacity and pointed to the fact that it was the only model 4 hospital and there were no model 3 hospitals in the region. It also found that there was inadequate management of existing capacity, in particular, human resources. That is just one day. Every day, UHL is o…

He is looking for a job.

If Deputy Healy-Rae wants to conclude, I am happy to give him a minute of my time.

I listened to today's debate and I thank the Minister of State for attending. Will he attend the European Council meeting?

I thank him for the confirmation. I do not mean to be smart-alecky but there is increasingly a bit of a disconnect. The Taoiseach is making statements that are very much in tune with what Dr. Ursula von der Leyen is saying but I wonder how in tune she is with the masses of Europe. She comes from a particular background, as we all do, but the old aristocratic elite of Europe is reasserting itself. We see the expansionist tendencies of that aristocratic elite also reasserting themselves. I will preface my comments by…

I thank Sinn Féin for tabling this motion. I partially heard the Minister's response to it. What I heard was slightly surprising in that, on the one hand, the Minister accused Sinn Féin of playing politics and not going with the clinical advice and, on the other hand, it appeared that he overruled the clinical advice and said they were not going ahead as previously planned. UHL and what can go wrong have been brought up on a number of occasions. The clinical advice at the time was that we needed to consolidate the …

I am struck by a number of things about this report. First, let us look around us. This is supposed to be the burning issue of our times and of this Government. I am one of three Opposition Members here, along with the Minister of State from the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine and Deputies Matthews and Leddin. I have no doubt that a huge amount of work went into preparing this report. I have been on committees over the years. I read through the report, albeit not in as much detail as I would have lik…

Are they? I think there are worse but perhaps there are not. That is not for me to judge but rather for the Acting Chairman. I thank her for her time.

I thank the Rural Independent Group for bringing forward this motion. It is important we discuss our energy policy. It is something I have advocated for some time. We simply do not have energy security in this country at the moment. We are in the decade of remembrance, the decade of celebrations. One of the first things the State did when it was founded was develop energy security and energy policy. It was a massive undertaking. It is fantastic the ESB allows school tours of Ardnacrusha again, just to see what the …

I would think that the President would like to be quoted.

The cost of living is beginning to hurt. I want to raise a specific issue, which is that the cost of getting to and from work is rising, as the Minister well knows. The Government has taken some steps to try to combat the cost of fuel but it has not been able to combat it adequately for the many people in the country who have to travel to work. It is costing people more and more to get to work. Obviously, it has to pay to be at work. The Government has created economic conditions whereby a huge amount of employment…

I was hoping for more of a commitment from the Minister that this issue would be addressed, not that it might be or he hopes we will get there. It absolutely needs to be addressed. He talked about the general measures the Government has taken but he also spoke about the money that was spent earlier. The increase in the cost of fuel is something that could not really be predicted because it is caused very directly by the conflict in Ukraine. However, inflation is something that was very predictably driven by the mon…

Lots of them are making that claim.

I wish to return to the issue of the emerging duopoly in our banking sector. A local businessman said to me recently that the two banks will do what they want and I had to correct him and say they are already doing what they want. In theory, we have supervision from the Central Bank, but in reality those two banks have been allowed to do what they want, and it will hurt rural economies. It is already hurting them. The supervision from the Central Bank is supposed to prevent what has happened, but the banks have pul…

A month ago, I raised the issue of overcrowding at University Hospital Limerick, UHL. The Taoiseach told me there was an expert group in place there to deal with overcrowding at the time and to develop recommendations into the future. I asked when it would report, to whom it would report and what were its terms of reference. I asked in particular whether the existing one model 4 hospital and the three model 2 hospitals were adequate. The Taoiseach did not know. He told me would come back to me, but he did not. I wr…

The Taoiseach is washing his hands of it. He set up the HSE so that he could wash his hands of it.