I agree with the Deputy that it is a shocking cost. It is not sustainable for a young man going into business to take a cost like that on board. Such costs militate against young people becoming entrepreneurs, getting into business and going out to work. The programme for Government sets out a multipronged approach to dealing with insurance, both on the personal injuries side and in terms of making sure there is fair competition. We will be tackling the insurance issue on a number of fronts.

Will the Deputy forward me the background and details of the case? Is it because of his private working hours that this individual is not allowed to perform his firefighting role?

If the Deputy sends me on the details, I will follow up on the matter.

I am not going to go through the mythology the Deputy articulated at the commencement of his question. I remember the decisions made by the North Eastern Health Board and we have come a long way in medicine since then. Very often now, it is the colleges of the various clinical specialties which determine the critical mass that justifies and sustains, for example, a maternity unit or an emergency department. Gone are the days when politicians claim we should have an emergency department without any reference to the …

The Mulvey report, Dublin North East Inner City - Creating a Brighter Future, commissioned by the Government and published in February 2017, contained recommendations for the social and economic regeneration of Dublin's north-east inner city, NEIC. This report has been further supplemented by the publication of the NEIC strategic plan 2020 to 2022, which is available on www.neic.ie In June 2017, the Government appointed an independent chairperson to the NEIC programme implementation board. Members of the board incl…

First of all, I would never see something like this as a box-ticking exercise. All my life I have been committed to the idea of dealing with the vulnerable, those living in poor conditions and those in disadvantaged communities. For example, I believe the RAPID programme of earlier years was an effective multisectoral multidepartmental approach to dealing with urban disadvantage and urban issues. The forerunner of that programme, the drugs task force areas programme, likewise took a holistic approach to development…

Deputy McDonald should write to me on that. I will talk to the Minister for Health on the point she has made and on what she was saying. I am unsure of the background. Deputy McDonald is suggesting that the HSE is undermining community participation. We will get that looked at. I have gone into some of the flat complexes with Senator Mary Fitzpatrick. I agree with Deputy McDonald that the conditions were poor and tight with no space. There were significant levels of respiratory conditions. I remember coming out of …

I propose to take Questions Nos. 2 and 3 together. As outlined in the programme for Government, several reforms will be implemented to ensure openness and constructive co-operation within the Government. The details of the roles and staffing of these offices have not been finalised to date. Appointments to these offices will be made in line with the Public Service Management Act 1997 and will be published in due course. These include the establishment of an office of the Tánaiste and an office of the leader of the …

I was going to come back to the Deputy.

I will deal with Deputy McDonald's queries. This is a tripartite Government. In fact, the model for it goes back to when the Labour Party was in government between 1992 and 1994 when Dick Spring-----

I was a humble backbench Deputy at the time. The Labour Party pioneered the idea of policy people coming in from the political world, which I happen to agree with, to ensure the implementation of a programme for Government.

People want the programme for Government to be implemented. They want to see through the political commitments that have been made. That was a major turning point in how Government works in terms of the use of special advisers. In the Northern Ireland Executive, the role of special advisers is strong and I have no difficulty with that. We know that special advisers in Northern Ireland play a key role in advising Ministers and working the machinery of government. Not all of the advisers will be political. Some of th…

I do not agree with that. There is a need and Government is becoming wide-ranging. There are areas, such as insurance, that need specialist attention. As we heard on the Order of Business, it is a key area and it is a good idea to have a Minister of State, together with senior Ministers, specifically charged with trying to deal with that area. That is the position. When we get further details we will put them out transparently. All of this information will be in the public domain. I will have further details on how…

The architect of this model of government was the Labour Party.

It is not rubbish. I recall Deputy Howlin and the then Tánaiste, Mr. Dick Spring, won a substantial number of seats. They no longer wanted to play second fiddle to the Fine Gael party and did not go into coalition with them. They entered into coalition with Fianna Fáil and developed this idea. We are political parties, and I do not mean political in the sense that one is just making appointments; we are parties that want to get policies implemented. There must be proper respectful demarcation lines between full-tim…

I am not even criticising it; I just note it. The emails were flying to and fro on that between all the special advisers of all parties so let us not pretend that this is something new. Ministers of State either mean something or they do not mean. In my view, they mean something in terms of the policy areas that are under their responsibility. The Minister of State with responsibility for disability will transfer to the Department of Justice and Equality. That is a substantive Minister of State portfolio because al…

That is the whole idea. The Deputy must accept in that situation there has to be a need for policy input to drive things on and get things done. The security issue has surfaced with regard to the Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade in terms of travel.

The Deputy may say that. Ordinarily, Ministers outside of the Taoiseach, Tánaiste and Minister for Justice and Equality hire drivers that are paid for by the taxpayer and travel-related costs are also associated with that. I am not sure where the Deputy got the figure of €200,000 net. I have no figures on that.

My understanding is that there was a security aspect to it. It is my understanding that the Tánaiste sought an aide-de-camp to assist him in his duties in terms of public occasions and events he will attend. In terms of equality, there are three super junior Ministers, as they are called, or super Ministers of State, at the Cabinet table, and there should be equality between all three. I will not mince around or do the popular thing and say we are afraid to bring anything to the table or to the House. If they are a…

I propose to take Questions Nos. 4 and 5 together. As committed to in the programme for Government, a national economic plan will be developed in the coming months to chart our longer-term, jobs-led recovery. The plan will put sustainability at the heart of our fiscal, enterprise, innovation and environmental policies. As part of the development of the new national economic plan, my Department will lead a high-level review of the economy. This review will seek to identify the sectors that have the greatest opportun…