Sorry?

I commend the Deputy's mastery of alliteration but what he said is not true. The bottom line is-----

-----that very significant funding has been allocated to retrofitting.

Let me take the issue. There is an allocation to social protection that goes into the various schemes to do with fuel poverty and that is very clear in terms of what we have done on the fuel allowance.

I am answering the question. The retrofitting has been an enormous allocation-----

-----and has come from the carbon fund. That has also happened in terms of the €113 million in carbon tax funding that has been allocated to agri-environment schemes.

What we could do, and I invite the Deputy to support me in this because he has genuine concerns about where the funding is going, is legislate to ring-fence the funding.

I think that would satisfy the Deputy's needs but I wonder whether he would be supportive of that if the next government was to bring in legislation to ring-fence the funding for specific purposes.

There is no missing money. It is all being spent.

I appreciate that the Deputy has been consistent and persistent in addressing the issue of balanced regional development. There are statistics, damned statistics and all the rest.

Hear me out, please. I was in a rural village recently during the local elections. A councillor pointed out to me that the population had gone from about 500 when he went into local government to 2,500 or 3,000, the point being that the place had grown. A lot of rural Ireland has grown in population yet the mantra is a declining rural Ireland. It has elected a lot of Independents to this House.

Somehow the truth is not reconciling here because there has been huge development in many parts of the regions. Equally, there have been big investments in Dublin and other urban areas. Post-Covid, it will be very interesting to see what happens because of the development of remote working, rural working hubs and so on. We are now getting a greater concentration of workers outside cities than ever before, which is adding to rural economies and local economies. Very large infrastructural investments are happening in…

We need to engage on this too. More than 500,000 jobs have been created since this Government took office. Some 75% of those new jobs were created outside Dublin. The mantra for years was that it was all Dublin-based, IDA-created jobs. That is not the case any more. The Government has mandated the IDA to look to secure at least 50% of all new jobs outside of Dublin. Approximately 1,800 IDA-client companies are directly employing more than 300,000 people in Ireland for the second consecutive year. More than half of …

No, they do not lie. Jobs are up by 18%. The 3,000 beds provided by the Minister, Deputy Stephen Donnelly, and the Department of Health are regionally proofed. They are across the entire region. All our training for nurses, due to decisions I took as far back as 2003, is regionalised. We gave the institutes of technology the capacity to train for nursing therapies way back. That is the way to do it.

I have no issue with meeting and will meet this representative group. I may not be able to do so today because the Iraqi Minister of Foreign Affairs is visiting Ireland and I have to meet him after this session. The Government is close to finalising a Covid inquiry. As I said, the objective of an inquiry into Covid and how the country managed it should be an evaluation to make sure that when the next pandemic comes, or other type of emergency, we will be well prepared for it. We should learn from the mistakes that …

Some 28,000 extra staff have been recruited since 2020. I regret that people, notwithstanding the context of 28,000 extra staff, including 9,000 extra nurses, feel that is a cause for industrial action. I acknowledge that there may be HR practices within the HSE that need addressing, but 4,000 staff have been regularised, which includes 2,000 extra people employed during Covid without sanction and 2,000 since then. In the financial settlement from the Department of public expenditure on health, which the Government…

I already articulated my horror at what is happening in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon, and my condemnation of what I consider to be war crimes and breaches of international humanitarian law. However, the presentation that the Government is somehow facilitating this is an outrageous assertion. We are facilitating no carriage of weapons to Israel or any other part of the world. That company violated Irish law, essentially. The Minister for Transport and his Department are endeavouring to get precise information fro…

-----if they want to fly through our airspace with weapons. If that company has flouted law-----

The way the Deputy presented it was less than accurate.

In the Fianna Fáil Party, for close to a decade now, we have had a free vote on issues to do with life or an issue of conscience. That will remain the position in respect of this proposed legislation. Even though I do not agree with such legislation and have very serious reservations about it, nonetheless, it will be a vote of conscience for each individual member of our party. I cannot speak for other parties in the Government.