Deputy Boyd Barrett has spoken about SHDs in Dublin and I want to talk about one in Cork at the old Ford distribution site in the marina, which is part of the Cork docklands site spanning 146 ha. This represents a real opportunity for public housing to be built on public land, both social and affordable housing. There is a large number of publicly-owned sites at Cork docklands including the ESB lands, the Marina, the Marina park, Kent Station, which is considered part of the docklands development site, the Camp Fie…

Some 136 constitutions globally refer to the right to work. Some 133 included the right to healthcare and 81 include the right to housing. The Irish Constitution refers to the right to private property. This has been used to deny union recognition. One has the right to join a union but not to be recognised. It has been used to weaken anti-eviction legislation and so on. It would be a step forward for the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights to be inserted into the Constitution. It would no…

Earlier this month, the Irish Council for Civil Liberties wrote to GSOC. Its correspondence included the following words: "In today’s globalised world we cannot ignore the international resonances of a police shooting of a black man." Ireland is not immune to the phenomenon of the over-policing of minority communities. The Irish Council for Civil Liberties observed that "the pain and anger in the black community in Ireland has been palpable since the killing of George Nkencho." The words of the ICCL only underlines…

The Minister states that she wants a traditional leaving certificate. To hell with the Minister's tradition. Tradition is not more important than health. Tradition is not more important than mental health. Tradition does not take into account the fact that these students have experienced serious disruption to their course, not once but twice.

It is a debate on education.

There are special needs students doing the leaving certificate.

What do the students want? Yesterday's Irish Second-Level Students' Union, ISSU poll of more than 20,000 students should give the Minister a fairly good idea. Four per cent want the Minister's traditional leaving certificate. Eighty-one per cent want a break with that model, as either a first or second choice for them is that they would have a choice between a watered-down leaving certificate and calculated grades. The Minister has not been listening. She has blocked students from making comments on her Instagram. …

I put it to the Minister that this is the most challenging week in the history of Ireland's health service. There are 2,000 Covid patients in our hospitals with 200 Covid patients in our intensive care units. There were 93 deaths yesterday. Last weekend there was the death of a nurse in a Kilkenny nursing home. With all of this going on, the Minister has decided that fourth year students, who are mostly female and young, should risk their lives and health to go into wards in hospitals that are raging with Covid-19 …

This agreement ends a chapter in the Brexit saga but it does not bring to an end the tensions between the capitalist powers. The agreement sets a framework in which ongoing tensions can be increased. The deal was negotiated and drawn up by representatives of British big business and their European counterparts. Such an agreement can never be in the fundamental interests of working people in Ireland, Britain or the EU. On the EU side, Brexit is a major blow but this agreement will allow the Union to protect its Sing…

One week from its publication, this report is widely discredited. The decision of its authors to disregard the witness testimonies in its conclusions was particularly galling. To state in the report that there was "very little evidence that children were forcibly taken from their mothers" or that the commission "accepts that the mothers did not have much choice but that is not the same as 'forced' adoption" is pretty grotesque when it is clear there was no informed consent. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael were the creato…

An extraordinary report appeared in The Business Post last weekend to the effect that the Government is considering vaccinating 61,000 students in order to allow them to sit the leaving certificate. I wonder which vulnerable group in society would be pushed down the vaccine queue in order to allow for such an extraordinary measure. I wish to ask the Minister about reports regarding the widespread medication of leaving certificate students in order that they can last the course and sit the exams. Last Sunday, primar…

The proposed agenda for the House tomorrow includes statements and questions to the Minister for Education and the Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science. Many of the parties represented in the House expressed the view to the Business Committee that they feel that the overwhelming bulk of the education-related issues the people they represent, namely, their constituents and those corresponding with them, want raised, debated and discussed in the House this week, relate to the br…

I wish to convey my condolences to the family of George Nkencho, who was shot dead on 30 December. The European Court of Human Rights has decreed that the death of any person at the hands of police requires independent official investigation. In this case, there needs to be an independent public inquiry that fully involves the family and the community. Regardless of the serious issues that led to George Nkencho being pursued, it is a matter of the utmost gravity when a young person is shot on his doorstep, not once…

This was the Ireland that was presided over by the men whose pictures hang on the walls of the Taoiseach and Tánaiste. It was the Ireland of Eamon de Valera, Seán Lemass, Jack Lynch and Charlie Haughey, and the Ireland of W. T. Cosgrave, John A. Costello, Liam Cosgrave, Garret FitzGerald and John Bruton. "What upset me is Micheál Martin blaming us - society," states Galway historian Catherine Corless. She is right to be upset. The Government's spin machine is emphasising the responsibility of the culture and the so…

The Government was full of praise for itself when Ireland had one of the lowest rates of infection in Europe before Christmas. Now it is trying to dodge responsibility when Ireland has the highest rate of Covid infection in the world. The Taoiseach went on the Claire Byrne show and tried to put the lion's share of the blame on the UK variant. He did not comment yesterday when Mike Ryan stated at a press conference that the variant is not the driver behind the new transmission rate. It is a factor but not the key fa…

I ask the Tánaiste for an update and a progress report on plans to implement the Duffy Cahill proposals.

The last Government, led by the Minister of State's party, failed to implement Duffy Cahill. The Minister of State and the Tánaiste have been in denial about that. They deny the negative consequences for our workers. Deny, deny, deny. They denied that in Debenhams it would have made any difference, saying it was different from Clerys because Clerys had a building, etc. Of course, that is true but the Government turned a blind eye to the fact that there is €9 million worth of fixtures and fittings in Debenhams, acco…

Equally, the authors of the Cahill Duffy report have failed to back the Tánaiste's view that the report would under no circumstances have been of assistance to the Debenhams workers. The important thing is that the legislation is implemented. Has the Tánaiste received any communications from trade union officials in the last half hour asking him to stop making the kind of comments he made in the Dáil earlier because they might be somewhat embarrassing to Ireland's trade union officialdom? The Tánaiste told Deputy O…

I will be brief. We are debating image-based sexual abuse and legislation to combat that. It is about time that this legislation was passed. The legislation needs to be strengthened by the amendments that we are debating today. This is legislation that has been within the Oireachtas for a period of three years. Successive governments and the political establishment have taken a blasé approach to it. It is the pressure from below - people power - which has put this issue on the agenda in recent weeks. I congratulate…

I refer to the Solidarity-PBP amendment No. 10, which would insert the word "holds" after distributes. The point that we want to make here is that in order to step over the line in terms of the law, it should not simply be the case of distributing the image, but if one holds the image with the intent to cause harm, that should be on the wrong side of the law. A practical example would be if someone was involved in blackmail. As I read it, the legislation as currently framed states that one has transgressed the law …