Last Friday I met a woman from mid-Kerry in the front room of her house. There was a beautiful view looking out over Castlemaine Harbour. She has been battling and beating cancer for the past ten years. She has a young family, one of whom returned home from school as we spoke. Every three weeks, she receives treatment in University Hospital Kerry for three hours with six or seven others. She knows all the staff by their first names. She had the height of praise for everybody in the unit. The people of Kerry are ver…

I wish to register my support for the Bill and commend the Labour Party on bringing it forward. On the ground in County Kerry, there has been a crisis in housing going back to 2011 when the decisions were made to stop building social housing and to abolish town councils, which exacerbated a difficult situation. I welcome in particular the provisions of the Bill relating to security and standards. It is a sound Bill overall and it is worthy of support. Tenants and renters in County Kerry have experienced a significa…

The crisis in University Hospital Kerry is becoming critical. Day procedures have been cancelled for the third week running, the hospital is short 100 nurses, orthopaedic services have been outsourced and ambulances are queuing up because the patients they are offloading are not being taken into the accident and emergency department. A scanning machine in the hospital can be used by only private patients. No wonder it is difficult to recruit surgeons for that hospital, given that they would be dealing with the most…

This interim measure to approve the sharing of data is a topic on which many people will have mixed feelings. The withdrawal of the UK from the European Union has been chaotic and is now proving to be a mess across a range of areas. The Government and the EU have got many things right. The sharing of data as part of the Prüm Convention may not be as high profile as other issues but it is nonetheless important. This is for the simple reason that criminal gangs are becoming increasingly organised. They are getting la…

Ba mhaith liom ceist a chur ar an Aire mar gheall ar the aquaculture licences, and to ask him how many licence appeals are currently pending in the Department. Last year there was an issue with applications from Castlemaine Harbour, between Cromane Point and the town of Killorglin. Some applications had been languishing in the Department for up to four years. What plans are in place to perhaps review the whole situation in that area?

The Minister mentioned providing clarity. In respect of the area that I spoke about between Cromane Point and Killorglin, we all saw the devastation that was wrought on the tourism industry last year and this year. Given that industry is in such a precarious position, the aquaculture jobs are essential to the area. They provide supplementary income and part-time income to many small farmers and local people, many of whom have been farming oysters for generations. When many of the people made their applications, the…

I thank the Minister for the reply. He is aware of another area of Kerry, around Renard Point, where applications were made for oyster licences. That process was abandoned last year for various reasons but I believe it is up and running again. Is the Minister aware of whether there have been difficulties with notification in respect of licensing applications in the Renard area? Some local people who have expressed an interest in the special area of conservation have been inquiring whether the difficulties that aros…

I was contacted by a man called James Sugrue, from Ballybunnion, and I will raise his story with the Tánaiste on his behalf. He and two of his brothers were boarded out at the mercy of the State and abandoned at the county home in Killarney where they suffered a horrendous experience. Mr. Sugrue spoke to An Taoiseach a few months ago and was promised that his case, and the cases of people like him, will be looked at. People who were boarded out were not part of the mother and baby inquiry and were not subject to th…

I have four minutes and I propose to share two of them with Deputy Martin Kenny.

This legislation puts forward yet another poorly thought-out system. Throughout the pandemic, the Government has overly relied on the criminal law rather than public health guidance. At a meeting of the justice committee, representatives from the Economic and Social Research Institute, ESRI, said it is a sense of solidarity and togetherness that makes people comply with health advice, not fines and imprisonment. There has been no training or guidance for the staff in the hospitality sector that are expected to enfo…

It seems barely a week goes by without us discussing more decline in rural life in Ireland. It is important we are having this discussion about post offices, which often remain the only focal point in some villages. We are stuck in an awful cycle of depopulation, downgrading of services, lack of investment, employment and then more depopulation. In the Listowel-north County Kerry area we have seen the threat to the SouthDoc service, the removal of dental services, the closure of the Courts Service office and now th…

I remember in the run-up to the election last year queueing at a funeral in Abbeydorney and seeing an election poster on the street. One person in front of me turned to the other and said, "Who thought that our pensions were going to be one of the biggest issues in this election?". Since then, the issue of workers' rights has never been far away. Whether it is redundancies, overtime, the lack of double time, the pandemic unemployment payment, PUP, or the Debenhams workers, we have seen how employers seem to hold al…

The intent of this Bill, which thankfully is time-limited, is welcome, not just for addressing a legal lacuna that was pointed out by An Garda Síochána but in giving certainty to the hospitality sector. Certainly, over the past few weeks, there has been much confusion, particularly in Killarney, as to what was contained in the town by-laws, which included a 100 m rule, as against the new regulations. Unfortunately, certainty has been in precious short supply and many of the other farcical decisions made by the Gove…

I raise the vital services provided by various schemes across the country, saving the State millions and providing vital social contact for participants and beneficiaries alike. The Tús scheme in south Kerry is running at about 55% capacity. The Department of Social Protection is not activating it and it needs to. The rural social scheme will be in sharp decline due to the six-year rule, which needs to be abolished because the scheme is vital for rural farmers and communities. More than 10% of participants in it ne…

It is heartening to see that in one of the reports that was laid before the House that the Minister accepts that some of these emergency provisions are a departure from normal practice. Many of the human rights leaders to whom we spoke recently accept that emergency provisions which are outside the norm tend to persist the longer they exist and if they are not used, they should cease. The annual renewal is not satisfactory, but rather than putting more appropriate legal architecture in place, successive Governments…

This Bill is welcome for a number of reasons. I commend Labour on introducing it. The need for a more equitable and rounded view of land, the purchase of land and policy relating to land has been urgent for decades. I noticed it in particular last night when canvassing on behalf of Senator Lynn Boylan around the Irishtown and Ringsend area, where, time after time, it came up on the doorsteps that people cannot afford the €500,000 needed to purchase houses for themselves or their families to keep them close to their…

I thank Deputy Nolan and the Rural Independent Group for moving the motion. The importance of the agrifood industry to our economy cannot be overstated. Previous speakers have said that the beef sector supports more than 70,000 beef farmers. There are approximately 3,000 in County Kerry alone. The sector supports 10,000 jobs across processing, distribution and transport and is worth €2.5 billion. Most important, the money is spent locally. It is spent on the local concrete men when buying drainage. All the local su…

While this Bill is important, just as important is the debate that surrounds it. We have been consistent in backing the public health guidelines while calling for proper measures on quarantine, track and trace and vaccine roll-out but we also believe the restrictions must be proportionate. It is these fundamentals that the Government needs to get right and I believe there have been many failings in doing so. On looking at the Preamble, everyone accepts that "a public emergency has arisen" and as for "extraordinary …

Over the past fortnight, 213 people, including 61 children, have been killed in Gaza. The number of Palestinians wounded stands at 1,400, with tens of thousands being displaced from their homes, according to the United Nations. Rallies were held all over Ireland, including two in County Kerry; one was in Killarney and the other in my home town of Tralee, which is twinned with Beit Sahour in the West Bank. We sent a strong message of solidarity to them. The other rally I was at in the last fortnight was up in Gortag…

I am sure the Taoiseach is aware of the crisis in the public provision of dental healthcare. Many people from all over Kerry have contacted my office. They cannot even get an appointment to be seen, never mind receive dental treatment. The treatment service scheme is not fit for purpose. It has not been amended or improved for ten years. It is uneconomic for dentists to participate in the scheme and dentists actually lose money if they take on new medical card patients. People have contacted me to say dentists rece…