Are we saying-----

-----going forward we have an infinite resource base and that the current taxpayer and current generations will consistently have to pay for historic mistakes-----

-----or historic wrongs?

I am putting the question to the Deputy.

I would argue that is a key, fundamental point in terms of the allocation of resources.

It is not fobbing anything off, Deputy, it is just putting the reality that-----

It is the reality that confronts any Government at any particular time as we move forward.

Which the Deputy supported.

Deputy Doherty voted for it.

He supported it.

There is a cross-Departmental approach and a Cabinet sub-committee chaired by the Taoiseach with a range of Departments and Ministers attending. Prior to Christmas, former Limerick city manager Conn Murray was appointed to co-ordinate the work on the accommodation side. It must be acknowledged this is by any distance the largest humanitarian operation ever undertaken by the State. We have never had such a level of refugees fleeing war coming into the country. People continue to arrive from Ukraine. It is quite shoc…

The response has been unprecedented and it is the sheer numbers that have created the challenges. We will work on some of the suggestions the Deputy has made. There is cross-departmental engagement. The Department of Justice is heavily involved in this on the international protection aspect. The Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage is also. The Office of Public Works, OPW, in the first phase of modular housing has made significant progress and the first houses will be coming onstream within weeks in…

I believe they are and I would be fairly clear on that. Obviously, the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth is the central Department involved in the migration issue and international protection. That was ordained by the programme for Government but our response to this has to be cross-departmental. To be fair, when one thinks of the work of the Department of Social Protection, for example, there has been tremendous work done in facilitating people.

The protests are not-----

What year was that?

I disagree with the Deputy's narrative and assertion in terms of the past 30 years and the 30 years before that. If we go back over the past 25 years, right through it, there were quite a significant number of redress schemes. One of my first decisions was to launch the very first investigation into the role of church and State in the industrial schools. This was the first time it was ever done and we had a very extensive redress scheme in the aftermath of the commission on institutional abuse in our industrial sch…

The Deputy is wrong in his assertion in terms of the legal advice on nursing home charges. In respect of medical card patients, access to the entirety of their costs in private nursing homes was never conceded. Budgets are going up incrementally and exponentially year after year in terms of an ageing population. By the way, we still have that challenge today but no one wants to pay for it. All this money is not my money nor the Deputy's, it is the taxpayers' money. We are all birds of passage here, but the Deputy w…

I have no doubt, if we reveal all the legal strategies and all the legal cases that are before the State at the moment, I know what the Deputy's response would be: "pay it all out." He is asking current taxpayers to do all that. These are not popular decisions-----

The Government and the Executive are there for a reason from time to time. We can be judged rightly or wrongly and I accept that. We must, though, have an honest debate about this as well in terms of how far back we go, how much do we pay in terms of the wrongs of the 20th century-----

Whereas today-----