I want to return to the question I asked on the Order of Business. I got a lot of bluster back from the Taoiseach but I did not get an answer. It seems to me that a point of very basic inequality has been created, if I am reading the terms of the new PUP scheme correctly. I would be delighted if the Taoiseach could confirm to me that I am reading them incorrectly and that this inequality is not being created. It seems pretty clear that if, for example, a worker who was earning €450 a week in the entertainment secto…

In his discussions with President Biden, did the Taoiseach raise the issue of a TRIPS waiver to ensure that Covid vaccines can be rolled out worldwide and not just in the global north? If there is a fire in our house, we cannot just put out the fire in the bedroom and forget about all the other rooms in the house. Similarly, vaccinating everyone in the EU and the US but leaving the global south unvaccinated will inevitably lead to a higher number of additional variants and more danger of potentially dangerous varia…

The Government should do it then.

Even Joe Biden supports it.

Why is the Government backing big pharma?

Of course it is.

The Government is backing big pharma.

I thank Sinn Féin for tabling this good motion, which People Before Profit supports. It is coincidentally a good day for such a discussion in the sense that the hard, dangerous and vital work that is being done by people in the Dublin Fire Brigade and fire brigades across the country is clear to people who are watching the news, social media feeds and so on. How essential that work is is being underlined, and not just in terms of fighting fires. I welcome that the Government is not opposing the motion. That is good…

I did.

I do not, but this is a general point about how the Government has responded to motions. To people tracking this, it is clear how, six or nine months ago, the Government decided that it did not want pictures of it voting against stuff that people thought was eminently reasonable and it would instead allow those motions to pass. It would not vote against them but it would not necessarily implement them either. I hope that will not be the case in this instance. Not resourcing the fire brigade properly would be a diff…

I welcome the recent announcement of the reopening of the pandemic unemployment payment. I will be blunt that if by reopening the Minister means anything less than restoring the payment to €350, which was accepted as the level people needed to survive, and leaving it open to anyone who loses his or her job as a consequence of pandemic restrictions, that will simply not be acceptable. Nor will it be acceptable if there is any small print, anything that states it will be kept at €250 or only those in restaurants will…

Has it?

The means test has been changed.

There you go. Great. You get somewhere eventually in this place.

Literally as we speak.

That is fantastic. I am very happy to hear that. I will call my constituent who has been battling away on that issue immediately once I am out of the Chamber. He will be delighted. The €5 and the increase in means test thresholds are still extremely minimal, but we will take them. You have to put pressure on in this place. It takes a long time to get even a fiver for people. I will speak more generally then. I refer to what has become an annual tradition, that of the €5 increases in social welfare payments, which t…

Yes, I will, in light of the change of facts on the ground. I recognise that.

On 16 October, a fire broke out at the Glashaus building in Tallaght. People were trapped for half an hour on balconies. They were terrified for their lives. Thankfully, there were no casualties, but there could have been. People were waiting for 20 minutes for the aerial platform to arrive from Tara Street. Since then, I have been asking questions about this. What has emerged is that there are three appropriate aerial appliances in Dublin, two of which are in Tara Street and one in Dún Laoghaire. There are high-ri…

I will speak briefly in support of all of these amendments, which add a modicum of democratic accountability to the significant power being given to the Minister. We favoured mandatory hotel quarantine at a certain point in time. We called for it to be introduced across the board as part of a public health system. We said it should not be outsourced and called for appropriate oversight to exist to ensure people’s civil liberties and human rights were not being contravened. We have now had the experience of the Gove…

Why did the Government not put the US on the list?