Yes. The housing crisis already existed. The housing crisis was not caused by the war.

Ukraine is not an excuse for everything.

Last night, the Green Party held the casting votes on whether to hold a referendum to enshrine neutrality in the Irish Constitution. Shamefully, its members voted with Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael to block that referendum. In doing so, they voted against the long-standing position of the Green Party and the position for which the Minister voted in 2003, 2016 and 2018. Later that evening, it emerged that the Tánaiste, and future Taoiseach, Deputy Varadkar, had told the Fine Gael Parliamentary Party that Ireland should …

Hear, hear.

The media reports that the Government opposes the Bill on the basis that it is "unnecessary". People may ask what that means and why it is unnecessary. Perhaps many people assume it is unnecessary because they believe neutrality is already enshrined in the Constitution, which it is not, or the reason the Government believes it is unnecessary is that it is saying "Do not worry; there is no threat to neutrality from this Government". The evidence is very clearly to the contrary. The Taoiseach who leads the Government…

Exactly. We have opposed it for years. The Minister has participated in this process of European militarisation. The majority of people in this country defend neutrality.

Exactly. We will not have a referendum - I thank the Minister for the confirmation - before the Government decides to send working-class young people from this country abroad to serve in a European military operation. Do we get a commitment from the Government before it abandons even the triple lock? This acts as a certain restriction on its ability to, again, send working-class people to fight elsewhere in the world and it is even in the programme for Government, but for which the Minister has floated the idea of …

You are the Government.

We can have a referendum.

I am sharing time with Deputies Boyd Barrett and Barry. I will mainly focus my remarks on the question of giving the best welcome to those who are fleeing from Ukraine and coming to Ireland. Before I get to that, I want to make a couple of international points. Does the Irish Government have a position on the call from large trade unions in Ukraine and social movements for the cancellation of Ukraine's odious debt? It is immense; the foreign debt stands at $125 billion. The debt servicing expenditure is 12% of all …

Last September, the Taoiseach first promised a bonus for front-line health workers who helped in the fight against Covid-19. Seven months on, not a single cent has been paid out and now many workers are finding out that they either will not qualify for the full bonus or they will not get anything at all due to the Scrooge-like terms and conditions being applied. One such group is the Covid-19 community swabbers, who helped to run our testing facilities throughout the country before vaccines were even available and …

I thank Sinn Féin for using its time on this issue again. It is ironic. In recent months every time the Opposition demands a debate on something, the Taoiseach, in particular, likes to say the Opposition has all this Private Members' time to use and if Opposition Members want a debate on Yemen or the national maternity hospital, they should use that time. If the Government and the State agencies at the HSE did not break their own law and force Sinn Féin and the Opposition to use Private Members' time to raise the s…

There is a massive sense of solidarity among ordinary people with the Ukrainian refugees, who have had no choice but to flee their country and arrive in countries such as Ireland. There is also massive support for the idea that the State must do everything possible to support those people. The question is whether the refugee process will be reformed now so all refugees coming to Ireland receive the same sort of welcome and support, regardless of which country and war they are fleeing and of the colour of their skin…

I welcome the processes put in place to assist Ukrainian refugees find accommodation, get a personal public service, PPS, number, access education and healthcare and avail of banking services. They also gain permission to work in Ireland and to access translation services. The processes and hubs that have been put in place are precisely what are necessary for people who are fleeing a war situation to help them find security and safety while they deal with the trauma of their experiences and their flight to safety. …

The Minister of State is saying Ukrainian refugees who come here will not have to go into direct provision. They will be given hubs, PPS numbers and education assistance. These are all the things a refugee needs. It is great. It is brilliant. It is what we need for Ukrainian refugees. At the same time, the Government will continue to say people who come from Syria, Libya or wherever else will go into direct provision. There are more than 6,000 people in direct provision now, including almost 2,000 children. It is a…

It is very clear that this Government is determined to erode any remaining semblance of Ireland's military neutrality. It is doing so extremely cynically by attempting to portray it as a necessary and mature response to Putin's horrendous invasion of Ukraine. The truth is that it is not a new position for the political establishment or Fine Gael. We can go back 19 years to 2003, when Fine Gael proposed in a policy document to move beyond neutrality. The document supported participation in a common EU defence policy…

Will the Minister agree that there be a referendum and that the people get to decide on the question of neutrality instead of having a false mature public debate which does not actually allow the people to participate? Will the Minister accept that if Ireland is going to join a rapid reaction force which is, in effect, a super-sized European battle group comprising 5,000 soldiers, there should be a referendum? Would he accept that if Ireland is to drop the triple lock that there should be a referendum? People in th…

Will the Government give the people a referendum before joining the rapid reaction force?

Last October, the Holy Spirit junior school in Greenhills was told it would lose a teaching post and would have to go from having four junior infant classes to three. This was because a number of parents who had planned to start their children in junior infants in September decided to keep them back a year in light of the scale of the Covid pandemic at the time and the negative impact it had already had on their children's preschool education. For the past five months, the school has managed to shuffle around teach…

I appreciate that the Minister of State has the response from the Department and is reading it out, but it is just the same response that we got in October 2021 basically, which is just a sticking to the rigid bureaucratic rules of “these are the numbers, etc.” It is not taking into account the reason that they fell short was because of the pandemic. The school staff then took the decision to try to use some resources available to them to try to maintain the four junior infant classes that they started off with, wh…