Did the Taoiseach just drop a rather large hint as to the timing of a general election?

The Central Bank stated this morning that the number of housing completions by the end of this year will be 32,000. The Taoiseach came in and told the House that the Central Bank is wrong and the number of housing completions will be 40,000. If a general election is held in February of next year, the likelihood is that before it is held, the Taoiseach will have been shown to be wrong. It will have been shown that the Government's housing policy has failed and the Government has failed in the targets it has stretche…

The case of Harvey Sherratt has been raised in the Dáil today. Can the Taoiseach give the House a guarantee that no other children were taken off the CHI scoliosis lists without consultation with or notification of their parents and if he cannot, will he investigate whether that was the case? Will he call for the publication of the Arthur Cox investigation into CHI’s management of issues surrounding the scoliosis crisis? Will the State cover the cost of insurance for bringing children with scoliosis to the United S…

What about Arthur Cox?

Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have spent €10 million of the people's money on legal fees to try to stop the European Commission giving Ireland €14 billion. That is some legacy; that is something to stand over. I have been clear the priority for spending this money is social and affordable housing and tackling the housing crisis. I support the establishment of a State construction company and Apple tax money being used as seed capital to get that company up and running and to have a laser-like focus on building social a…

I want to make a few points about daycare in my constituency of Cork North-Central. Northside Community Enterprises are currently waiting on a green light from the Department for funding of approximately €300,000 to renovate the old Before 5 family centre in Churchfield. This early learning childcare and community centre was closed suddenly in August 2023 with more than 100 children enrolled for the year ahead. Its loss has been an open wound on the north side of Cork city. This centre will not reopen for the curre…

How soon?

St. Killian's special school in Mayfield, County Cork, is the largest special school in all of Munster. No therapists have been in this school since 2019. Last November, the Minister of State, Deputy Rabbitte, met a delegation from the school which included the principal. At that meeting, the Minister of State promised to make €150,000 available to the school to hire therapists. The school soon put the arrangements for this to happen in place and waited. Meanwhile, St. Killian's was told that a pilot programme retu…

Last November, the Minister of State made a promise and she has not delivered on that promise. The Minister of State owes this school. The Minister of State owes these children. They have an ask and I am asking the Minister of State to reply to this. They are asking for sufficient funding to hire the therapists even if it is only for a few months before the Minister of State gets them into the pilot scheme. They do not want to be left hanging in limbo. Maybe there will be a pilot scheme. Maybe there will be somethi…

So the Minister of State can hire from October-----

It is goodbye to Jacob Rees-Mogg, Liz Truss and all the other Tories, and good riddance. It was a landslide but, as one commentator said, it was a loveless landslide. There seems to be little or no enthusiasm for Starmer's Government. It is true that it win 9.6 million votes compared that with the 13.8 million and 10.2 million won under Corbyn in 2017 and 2019. The vote for Reform UK is a warning. It may only have won five seats but it came second in more than 100 constituencies, garnering more than 4 million votes…

I must put on the record my disgust at the bombing of the children's hospital in Ukraine. It shows the true face of Russian imperialism once again. Ordinary people around the world will feel nothing but disgust for that, and have deep sympathy for the victims. This has nothing in common with the weasel words coming out of the NATO summit from people who are arming a state that is bombing schools and hospitals on a daily basis. I will now turn to the main point I wish to make today. Reducing the pension age to 60, i…

I add my voice to the call for a short debate on the situation with the NAS. These workers provide a vital service for people with disabilities. They have not had an increase in their basic rate of pay for more than a decade. They have been forced out on the picket lines because their employers, and standing behind their employers the Department of Social Protection, will not implement a Labour Court recommendation. We got lectures in here last week about the sanctity of the Labour Court and here we have a Labour C…

For autistic kids, early intervention is key. That is what all the experts say. The Disability Act places a legal obligation upon the State to determine within three months whether assessment is appropriate and then to assess within a further three months. I have here a letter sent last week by the HSE to the parents of a child living in Cork city who is just under two years of age. The letter confirms receipt of a referral for the child requesting an autism diagnostic assessment. It then goes on to say that the wa…

I would like to talk about the right to housing. Rickets, anaemia, faltering growth, extreme tooth decay and scabies are just some of the extreme health conditions now being reported by medical professionals regarding children living in emergency accommodation across this State. There are now 4,316 kids living in emergency accommodation. Ten years ago, the figure was just 700. With Fine Gael in government, those numbers rise month after month after month. Many of these kids have been living in emergency accommodati…

If you do not have the right bus ticket in Belfast, you will be fined £50 by Translink. Yesterday, a Belfast court ruled that a young man had to pay £50 to his former partner for repeated horrifying assaults that included punching, headbutting and holding a knife to her throat. The sentence was suspended and a two-year restraining order was put in place. Just weeks after thousands joined protests down here to stand with Natasha O'Brien and to oppose misogyny in the courts, a significant crowd joined an emergency st…

Misogyny, toxic masculinity, far-right ideology and anti-transgender rhetoric are what researchers from Dublin City University's anti-bullying centre were fed back within two minutes of registering fake accounts as teenage boys with TikTok and YouTube Shorts. TikTok recommended 76% toxic content after being watched for an average of just two hours and 32 minutes. You would want to be very naive to think there is not a strong connection between this kind of stuff and male violence against women. Andrew Tate is typic…

Real life is showing that the centre right acts as a handmaiden for the far right. In the US, the incompetence and policies of Biden and the Democrats are paving the way for Trump. In France, the policies of Macron have paved the way for Le Pen and the far right. There is now a real threat of a far right government by the end of this weekend. By adopting far right policy proposals, many included in the European Union migration and asylum pact, Macron made anti-immigration politics more mainstream and gave a boost t…

I received the Taoiseach’s correspondence.

Yes, with a reply attached from the chief executive officer of Uisce Éireann on the issue of discoloured water in Cork city, so I thank the Taoiseach for that. However, the correspondence does not include what the Taoiseach promised to get for me, that being a timescale for the resolution of the problem. The correspondence names mid-November as a target date for the completion of a number of local flushing programmes, but local flushing only lessens the problem, and then only temporarily. It does not solve it. The …