It has been reported by The Ditch website that former Minister for Communications, Climate Action and Environment, Deputy Bruton, agreed to lease land he owns to Energia for a solar farm development seven months after leaving ministerial office. Energia began consulting with planning officials in February 2021, with Deputy Bruton having been Minister for Communications, Climate Action and Environment up to the previous June. Energia made €45 million in profit last year and, last month, it announced price increases …

Yesterday, the Minister for Health announced that IVF will be funded by the public system in 2023. For many couples, of course, that is a very welcome announcement. If it happens, it will mean that Ireland is no longer the only country in the EU without any public funding for IVF. It would mean that access to this fertility treatment will no longer be reserved for those who either have enough money or for those who are willing and able to go into substantial debt. However, I do not want to hold my breath about it, …

I move: That leave be granted to introduce a Bill entitled an Act to amend the Safety, Health and Welfare at Work Act 2005 to ensure employers provide employees with FFP-2 grade masks, or higher, where necessary during the Covid-19 pandemic, in particular to education workers and healthcare workers, and to provide for a review of this provision within 3 months of enactment. The Bill proposes that employers, and in the case of public sector employees the State, will have to provide appropriate personal protective eq…

I move: "That the Bill be taken in Private Members' time."

I spent much of the last week campaigning for People Before Profit candidates in the Assembly elections. The issue on the doors everywhere, just like in the South, was the cost of living and rising energy costs in particular. People are being hit extremely hard. As a glimpse of the kind of elections we may have if this crisis continues, people were absolutely furious with the big parties for doing nothing to protect them from energy costs, when they can see and there was widespread awareness that the big energy com…

The teacher unions had their conferences over Easter. One clear message from right across all the conferences was the need for substantial pay increases to compensate for the rising cost of living. The Teachers Union of Ireland, TUI, conference went so far as to pass a motion that said unless a meaningful pay offer was made by the end of the school or academic year which provides for increases that keep pace with the level of inflation, the TUI should initiate a ballot for a campaign of strike action. The union is …

We are experiencing a climate catastrophe. I often think from listening to debates in this House that this has not dawned on people enough. To quote the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Working Group III report, there is a "rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all". We are in a biodiversity emergency and experiencing the sixth mass extinction event on this planet. We are also experiencing a cost-of-living crisis. Half a million people are in fuel poverty a…

I can confirm what Deputy Bruton said. Obviously, we welcome the introduction of a right to statutory sick leave in this country. It is a good thing that we are going to have it, even if it is extremely overdue and even if it is a lot less than what we need to have and what workers deserve in this country. Ireland has been an extreme outlier in not providing any statutory sick leave. This is also the case in terms of the lack of the right to collective bargaining or trade union recognition. It is striking that it t…

Hear, hear.

I wish to raise a scandalous case of a mass eviction at Shannon Arms in Limerick. Up to 60 families are facing eviction by a consortium of landlords. Four of the landlords are evicting on the grounds of sale. Notices of eviction were signed at the same place and witnessed by the same solicitor on the same day. Another landlord, the millionaire owner of Supermac's, Pat McDonagh, is evicting his tenants on the grounds of renovation, a claim backed up by a company run by his son-in-law. The suspicion is that the other…

I express our solidarity with the people of Ukraine. People across the world have been horrified and moved by the graphic pictures of horror and brutality unleashed by the invading imperialist Russian forces that have emerged. Those images cannot but move people and give them a sense of the extreme horror of war. I will address the point that was made by Deputy Richmond which was, in some ways, an attempt to suggest that People Before Profit and others on the left are in some way pro-Putin because we do not support…

I move amendment No. 1: To delete all words after "Dáil Éireann" and substitute the following: "having reflected on the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, declines to accept the carbon budgets presented for 2021-2025 and for 2026-2030 as: — they are not aligned with the State's commitments entered into under the Paris Agreement; and — therefore, calls on the Minister for Environment, Climate and Communications to consult with the Climate Change Advisory Council in order to amend the budge…

Even necessary?

Will the following questions be taken tomorrow?

Can we take all of those questions together?

Will the Taoiseach respond to the calls from Ukrainian trade unions and socialist organisations to cancel Ukraine's debt? This is odious debt. It is a result of the total oligarchisation of Ukrainian society, the refusal to go after the wealthy and horrendous conditions imposed by the IMF. The IMF repayments this year alone are the equivalent of 16.5 million average pension payments in Ukraine. That is 12% of the total state expenditure. The debt needs to be cancelled. That is a concrete measure that can be taken n…

Is the Taoiseach going to support the cancellation of debt?

Just answer the question.

What about the suspension of the parties?

I thank Sinn Féin for tabling this motion. The starting point for a discussion on childcare in this country is acknowledging that the system we have is thoroughly broken from almost every point of view. It is broken from the point of view of parents, who are struggling and scrambling to try to find places for their children, and then trying to afford another mortgage, in effect, to get their children the care they need. This is a crisis for women in particular, on whom the burden of caring falls if they cannot find…