Let us knock one of the three groups. These questions need to be answered.

Could I have clarification? Is the Garda obliged to take in a family with children, or-----

There are people who want an answer to the question. Will the Taoiseach please answer the question very briefly?

Is the Garda obliged-----

-----or is it on a station-by-station basis.

So we do not know?

We do not know the answer to the question.

He does not know the answer to the question.

It is an incredible position.

The Department of Health signed up to the Safe Staffing Framework, a data-driven, evidence-based system which can pinpoint the staffing levels needed to provide safe staffing in every hospital ward in the State. Cork University Hospital is one of the State's flagship hospitals, yet, according to the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation, INMO, only four of the 21 wards at that hospital meet Safe Staffing Framework guidelines. How can the Taoiseach defend the fact that more than 80% of the wards at one of the State…

Teaching English as a second language is a key task and challenge for our infant and primary schools, given the increased levels of immigration, but the policy of the Department of Education - the Taoiseach's Government policy - is making the task of the schools far more difficult and has the potential to prove very divisive. Until recently, the norm has been for children to be entitled to two years of teaching of English as a second language. However, the policy has been changed. A child is now only entitled to th…

Two weeks ago, Ministers scattered to the four corners of the earth for St. Patrick's Day. We all saw the pictures from New York and Washington, but I want to refer to some visits that received rather less media attention. I am interested in, for example, the visit of the Minister of State, Deputy Josepha Madigan, to Qatar, a country where homosexuality is illegal under threat of sentence of death. I am interested in the same Minister of State's trip to the United Arab Emirates, a country in which the United Nation…

Can the Minister of State confirm that he or the senior Minister signed this contract with Slovakia last month? Can he confirm that the decision was made without any reference to this Dáil debate and that what is happening here is merely a rubber-stamping exercise? The top ten carbon emitters in Ireland are almost without exception private business interests, including no less than four separate cement plants, yet the bulk of the €3 million the State is paying here for exceeding the carbon targets and the bulk of t…

There are 3,000 households with notices to quit against their names. The Government has fired the starting gun for those evictions to begin this weekend. Where are people going to go? Nobody knows for certain. The Taoiseach wore a cloak of certainty when he said last week that the majority of people will not knock on the door of homeless services for emergency accommodation. I suspect he is probably right. Why would they go to homeless services? What they will do in the main is beg friends and family to put them up…

Thanks to you.

Here are a few things we know. We know that children living in emergency accommodation, such as hotel rooms, learn to crawl later and learn to walk later than children living in homes with any bit of space. We know that some children living in homeless accommodation start speaking at a later age than other children due to the trauma of losing their homes. We know that thousands of households have notices to quit, NTQs, against them, that the majority of local authorities are out of emergency accommodations, that ma…

The Taoiseach said he does not feel there is an acceptable level of homelessness. He cannot have it both ways. He cannot say that on one hand and come in here at 4.40 p.m. and vote to lift an eviction ban which he knows will put significant numbers of people, including children, into homelessness. He cannot have it both ways. The Taoiseach does feel that there is an acceptable level of homelessness and his denials are not convincing or credible. The Government’s numbers are shrinking. It will be a minority Governme…

The Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation is to commence a ballot for industrial action of its members in the coronary care unit of Cork University Hospital. These front-line workers have been forced to work with unsafe staffing levels for far too long. They have also been forced to work with an inappropriate skills mix in their team. If these workers decide to take industrial action, I believe they deserve the support of the Cork public and all who want to see a better health service in this country. Although any…

Twenty-four people died in a 51-bed nursing home at Ballynoe in Cork in the third wave of Covid-19 at the start of 2021. "Prime Time" recently revealed that the HSE was notified of the outbreak on 8 January but did not visit the home until 16 February. A HIQA visit, after 22 people were already dead, found nine unreported deaths, multiple violations of infection control regulations and no Covid-19 risk management plan. I believe the privatisation of the nursing home sector and the for-profit ethos were major factor…

What about the Ballynoe inquiry?