That is not what the amendment says.

I will be extremely brief. The crux of the issue is 100% redress and nothing less. This amendment is aimed at scrapping the asterisks and small print the Minister has put in, which, in effect, turns 100% redress into 80% redress. It means that homeowners would not be able to access it. It is completely immoral and unjust because it puts a burden on homeowners who are at no fault for this whatsoever. This is essential. The Minister should accept the amendment. I also encourage Deputy Calleary to follow the example o…

We would come up with a new one then.

I will briefly speak to amendment No. 7, which gets to the heart of the issue, in the sense that it is not enough to just have the power to compel schools to open special education classes more rapidly. The resources have to be in place so these classes actually work for children, teachers and schools. I hear the Minister's objection, which is twofold. One part of it is that some of the resources being referred to are from the HSE rather than the Department of Education and, second, she thinks it will delay the pro…

I thank Sinn Féin for bringing forward this very important motion. I attended an event last week organised by the Children's Rights Alliance to discuss the issue of child poverty, including the issue of the cost of education. It is striking that Ireland is the fifth richest country in the world on a GDP per capita basis, but one in nine children in the State live in constant poverty. This is 134,000 children. These are the children who are going to go hungry this summer because school is out and they cannot access …

The context of this debate is the fact, confirmed by the Ombudsman for Children, that the State is failing children with special needs. The Department of Education is failing such children and it is an absolute scandal. The children still being failed the most are the more than 100 children who do not have appropriate school places for September. It is now 1 July and that is a matter of a small number of months away. The State is failing many more children with special needs than that. In reality, as regards what s…

The Ombudsman for Children found that the State is failing children with special needs, which means the Government is failing children with special needs. It is particularly failing those children who do not have an appropriate place for September when it is now the end of June. The original response from Government to that failure was the awful scheme for special education centres, which has thankfully been dropped. There has now been an attempt to distract from the Government's failings by putting the blame on fo…

Will the Minister of State apologise to the four DEIS - Delivering Equality of Opportunity in Schools - schools that she named? She said that the decision to name the schools had been made because they were "not engaging at all" with the Department and were "just ignoring correspondence". When the schools produced correspondence to prove that was not the case, the Minister of State's story changed. She said they were ignoring the import of the correspondence, a very different story from what she had made public. Wi…

I will ask again. Will the Minister of State apologise to the four schools? She attempted to name and shame them to distract from her and the Department's failures. She put wrong information into the public domain by saying that they were not engaging at all and "just ignoring correspondence" when it has been proven that this is not the case. Will she apologise to the principals, teachers and the schools? Then we can put this distraction behind us and move on in dealing with this crisis. In Dublin 24, for example, …

I ask the Minister about the leaving certificate results being delayed for the third year in a row, to 2 September on this occasion. As I am sure the Minister knows, this will create a crisis for students seeking accommodation and will present real difficulties for those studying abroad and real problems for those with disabilities who are to go through an access programme, these programmes normally starting a week earlier than the regular college year.

Just because it happened last year and the year before, it does not mean it is okay. Is this going to be the norm now? The Covid situation this year is quite different from the situation last year or the year before. The norm previously was for results to be out in the middle of August. This still left students in a difficult situation with regard to getting accommodation but it was more doable. It is now left extremely late in the context of the existing accommodation crisis, which includes a crisis in student acc…

I agree we are still in a Covid environment. I often find I am the one pointing that out. It is the Government that is getting rid of long Covid leave. It is the Department of Education that is telling very high-risk individuals they have to go back to the workplace. Clearly, we are in a different situation than we were last year or the year before. Regardless of the reasons, will the Minister in her response focus on what the Department is going to do to mitigate and minimise the bad effects as a consequence? What…

The first thing I wish to do is pay tribute to the many campaigners throughout the country, some of whom are in the Gallery. When faced with a situation where they discover the house they bought whatever number of years ago is basically crumbling around them, people could be forgiven for collapsing into despair and thinking there is nothing they can do. We are still not where we need to be but we are at the point we are now because the campaigners did not just take that approach. Their backs were to the walls and t…

Just before Deputy Jim O'Callaghan leaves, he said that the only miscarriage of justice he was aware of in the Special Criminal Court is the Sallins case. A quick Google search on my phone presented a case from 2021 where a man spent 14 months in prison for IRA membership and the Special Criminal Court subsequently found that to be a miscarriage of justice. The point is that the majority of miscarriages of justice are never identified. It is the tip of the iceberg that we see. If we have circumstances where we have…

Vótáil.

The purpose of this motion is to strengthen sanctions against Russia and we are opposed to it for that reason because we are against sanctions on Russia. It is not because People Before Profit or the genuine socialist left is in any way soft on Putin, his gangster regime or his crimes being committed against Ukrainian people. In fact, we are the people who have been consistent on this. When Chechens were being massacred and Grozny was being razed, it was the socialist left that spoke out against it while British Pr…

Aughinish Alumina in Limerick said today it is beginning rock blasting to build yet another massive pit for storing toxic red mud. The new pond will be 8 m deep and 4.5 ha large, storing 40 million tonnes of waste right by the River Shannon. It is a disaster waiting to happen. Last month, I raised with the Taoiseach new evidence showing there was IDA Ireland interference in the previous investigation of the health impacts. Sitting in the Gallery that day were Pat and Nuala Geoghegan, whose farm animals died and who…

Covid-19 has not gone away unfortunately, if you look at the case numbers, the hospital numbers, or at the number of people who are, tragically, dying every week. The Government, however, is acting as if Covid-19 is just gone away and is acting to remove a number of different supports from people from 1 July. On this Friday, for example, long Covid leave or special leave with pay is ending. People still have Covid and are still suffering the effects of long Covid but the Government is withdrawing that support. The …

I wonder whether the Taoiseach has seen the pictures and videos from last Friday at the border between Morocco and the Spanish enclave of Melilla. Dozens of refugees fleeing war and oppression were crushed to death against the border fences. Others were beaten to death by the border patrol, all to stop them getting into the EU where they could claim refugee status. This was mass murder of refugees trying to flee persecution. NGOs are saying that at least 37 people have died; it could be more. Many more were injured…

I ask the Taoiseach to tell that to the refugees.