Yes. The line is that the proposal is a temporary option for those who are waiting. It is a draft, etc. I get the message. Nonetheless, there is a proposal. AsIAm put a statement up on Facebook after the meeting saying that, like here, the Department had sought to assure it that no decision had been made and that the Department had listened to the concerns, but AsIAm makes the point that the current proposal - which means there is clearly still a proposal - is not something that its organisation could ever support.…

I thank Oxfam for the annual report it publishes in the run-up to Davos highlighting the obscene and growing wealth inequality in our world. This year's report is entitled Profiting from Pain and it shows how billionaires have, quite literally, profited from the pain of ordinary people. One thing the report highlights, which the Government does not like to talk about, is the fact that while energy bills are going through the roof for ordinary people, contributing to a massive cost-of-living crisis, the five largest…

The Minister of State has spoken about the redistributive power of our tax system. I am not sure whether he noticed the Oxfam wealth report, which shows that the billionaires have got 55% richer over the course of the last two years while 700,000 people are living in deprivation. It is not much of a redistributive power if the wealth continues to funnel upwards while inequality continues to accelerate. When you say that Ireland is the fifth richest country in the world when measured by GDP per capita, people think …

I pay tribute to the medical scientists in the Public Gallery and the thousands of medical scientists who are not in the Gallery but back at work again on the front line. It is interesting that our motion and the Government's countermotion refer to the medical scientists as the "hidden heroes" of the health service. No matter what happens, after the vote tonight, the Dáil will officially recognise these workers as hidden heroes. This is what they are, as was demonstrated, above all, during Covid-19. Yesterday, work…

I raise the issue of bogus self-employment, which leaves many workers without their rights and costs the State up to €1 billion a year in lost tax revenue. The use of test cases to determine the employment status of large groups of workers by the Social Welfare Appeals Office has facilitated this abuse. There is no legal basis for categorising employment status purely based on occupation. We are now reaching the end of the line for the denials by the Minister for Social Protection, Deputy Humphreys, that test cases…

In January, IDA Ireland appointed a business development consultant in Israel to deepen links with the state that even Amnesty has now described as an apartheid state. Given last week's horrific war crimes by Israel with the targeting and assassination of Shireen Abu Akleh, including an illegal invasion of Palestinian territory and the horrific attack on her funeral, will the Government now reconsider this investment?

The Tánaiste and the Government have condemned the murder of Shireen Abu Akleh, but listen to the spokesperson for the Israeli military, Ran Kochav. He said she was filming and working for a media outlet amid armed Palestinians and stated, "They’re armed with cameras, if you’ll permit me to say so". They see journalists as being armed with cameras because the truth of the apartheid state and the oppression of Palestinians being beamed to the world is a weapon against the establishment in Israel. It is better to hav…

In March, the Minister said his Department was studying the Amnesty International report. Has he studied it yet? What conclusions has he drawn from it? Amnesty International indicted Israel for operating a racist and cruel system of apartheid against the Palestinian people, which is a crime against humanity. It stated that Israel deliberately denies Palestinians their basic rights and freedoms and that its blockade on Gaza leaves the area in a state of "perpetual humanitarian crisis", which amounts to a collective …

We had a hearing on this in the Joint Committee on Enterprise, Trade and Employment last week. What we heard from the representatives of Médecins Sans Frontières, Oxfam and the pharmaceutical industry was shocking. Médecins Sans Frontières said literally millions of people have died as a consequence of the failure to give a TRIPS waiver. We heard about the almost $100 billion in public funding given to the pharmaceutical industry to develop these vaccines and about the significant profits, which were not contested …

The Minister of State is closing his eyes to the truth and resting in a comfortable ideology that the free market is delivering. What happened was $100 billion of public money was employed because the public said we needed to develop vaccines and therapeutics as quickly as possible. That benefit was privatised. Earlier, I said they are making $1,000 profit per minute. I meant $1,000 per second. That is Pfizer, Moderna and BioNTech. These companies spend more on advertising than on research. That is true of Pfizer, …

In 2020, Pfizer, Novartis and GlaxoSmithKline all spent more on sales and marketing than on research and development.

I want to ask about the scandals at the top of An Bord Pleanála. The terms of reference of the review have been published and they leave a lot to be desired. They are extremely narrow, dealing with only three particular decisions of the board and only one of the board members, Mr. Paul Hyde. The terms of reference do not include the 2019 case in which Mr. Hyde approved the deeply unpopular co-living development by Bartra in Dún Laoghaire, for which his brother's firm had been employed to produce the fire safety rep…

The context of this debate is the sixth mass extinction event, which we are currently living through, with a horrendous, dramatic, marked decline in biodiversity. Some 85% of Ireland's protected habitats are in an unfavourable condition, 46% are in ongoing decline and 43% of protected species are afforded unfavourable status. This biodiversity crisis is part of the rift opened up between humanity and nature by the economic system of capitalism, the organisation of production and agriculture on the basis of profit a…

This morning, I visited the picket line of medical scientists at Tallaght University Hospital. They are among the more than 2,000 members of the Medical Laboratory Scientists Association, MLSA, who are on strike today. By the way, the public support for them and the support from patients were quite overwhelming. These are the hidden heroes of our health service. They are the people who process test samples for Covid-19, who do blood tests and who test urine and stool samples. They have been under intense pressure d…

The Taoiseach described this as a long-standing issue. For workers suffering because of low pay, 21 years is very long-standing when we have an expert group recommendation that is simply not being implemented. There has been a passing of the buck throughout this whole process. When the MLSA negotiate with the HSE, the HSE states the problem is it cannot get the money from the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform, but that Department is not in the room at the WRC, for example. If the Taoiseach is pointing to …

Does the Taoiseach agree the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform should be present at the WRC?

Will the Taoiseach back the growing calls for debt relief for Ukraine? Even the US Congress has now backed calls for suspending all debt service payments by Ukraine and for debt relief. Ireland has reportedly given around €20 million in humanitarian aid to Ukraine but the Ukrainians are spending 300 times that amount, or €6 billion, this year just servicing their odious debt. This means that all of our humanitarian aid amounts to less than 40 hours of servicing that debt. Unless the debt is cancelled, the money is …

The shared island we stand for is a secular and socialist island. An essential point of that is no involvement of the church in terms of healthcare and education. That is a very basic thing yet the Government signed an agreement and lease with St. Vincent's Healthcare Group, where the first line of the constitution literally is about the mission of Mary Aikenhead, who was the founder of the Sisters of Charity, which was responsible for the running of the Magdalen laundries, thereby completely contradicting that ide…

It goes back to the permitted use.

The Taoiseach is familiar with the case of Pat and Nuala Geoghegan, who have for more than 25 years been highlighting serious concerns about the health and environmental impacts of the Aughinish Alumina plant neighbouring their farm. They have raised serious questions over a previous investigation into this in the late 1990s, in particular highlighting 18 medical samples that mysteriously disappeared. I have copies of a previously unpublished letter from the IDA and of notes from a previous meeting the agency had w…