The Government policy of hear no evil, see no evil in the schools is now unfortunately coming to fruition. I want to pay tribute to Ms Vicky Barron, the principal of CBS Primary School in Wexford town. The school made the decision to close because more than 10% of their pupils had Covid-19. She appropriately made the point on the radio that the HSE says this is not a school outbreak. What is it, then? It did not come out of the walls. Incredibly, the school has now been pressurised by the Department to reopen. The …

The Government stopped contact tracing.

That is because the Government stopped contact tracing.

I agree.

Is the Taoiseach saying that the public health advice is not to have filtration systems?

I raise the case of Nadim Hussain, who is on his seventh day of hunger strike. He is living in Cork, where the Taoiseach comes from, and is on hunger strike because the International Protection Appeals Tribunal has affirmed a recommendation of the international protection officer that he should be refused a declaration as a refugee, which has the consequence of threatening him with deportation. He seeks the right to remain here as a refugee. He is a Muslim from India and said to breakingnews.ie :"If I go back to In…

There is a new report from the UN Environment Programme out today and it concludes that fossil fuel production planned by the world's governments vastly exceeds the limit needed to keep the rise in global heating to 1.5°C. In fact, it finds that it is at 110% extra so we would be heading for more than a 3°C rise. In a way, that encapsulates the new form of climate denialism which is dominant throughout many of the world's governments, which is to accept the science and say it is clear that human-generated climate c…

In this country.

The politically powerful. Those with the ear of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael.

It is Larry Goodman, the beef barons, Greencore.

That is because I am not talking about ordinary farmers. That is why.

Do we need a reduction in the national herd?

We are exporting milk powder.

There are seven and a half minutes for me and two and a half for Deputy Barry.

The feminist performance piece A Rapist in your Path was first performed in Chile in November 2019. It quickly went viral because it resonated with women in particular, with street performances by activists around the world, including in Ireland. The central point of the piece is to highlight the complicity of the state in violence against women. Many here today might think that that has little relevance to the Irish State. I am sorry to say that that is entirely wrong. The citizens' assembly recommendation on ques…

One of the women reported harassment to the gardaí. She was told that it was a case of boy meets girl and that there was nothing to investigate. We know that the Garda Síochána Ombudsman Commission, GSOC, was of little use, and so far the Taoiseach has also been of no help. This pattern of State harassment and State violence against women, and minimising and ignoring it, is not an isolated incident. A well-known US study found that police officers are 15 times more likely to be perpetrators of domestic violence tha…

People are facing a real crisis this winter in terms of energy and fuel costs. Many people are already seeing rises of over €500. The Government in the budget last week made much of the extra €5 for those on fuel allowance, even though it is less than a third of the cost that many will face. It also announced that the means test would be increased by €20. It did not announce that the increased means test will not apply until 7 January next year. I have a man who is €5 over the current means test. If the Taoiseach a…

I want to raise the issue of workers and trade union rights, North and South. In the South we are governed by the Industrial Relations Act 1990, which banned political strikes, solidarity actions, solidarity strikes and secondary picketing, and which restricted workers' rights to organise. In the North, workers and trade unionists face Thatcher era legislation with similar effect. The power to change these laws has been devolved to Stormont for more than 20 years but none of the parties in the Executive has attempt…

I raise with the Taoiseach the question of the homophobic and transphobic attacks being carried out by the ruling party in Poland, Law and Justice. Like the Hungarian regime, it has engaged in continuous attacks on LGBTQI+ people. The Polish President has described homosexuality as a foreign ideology that is "worse than communism". The Archbishop of Krakow has described it as "a rainbow plague that is worse than Bolshevism". There is a certain trend in terms of analogies. At a national level, there have been restri…

We are being asked to ratify the partnership and co-operation agreement with Singapore today. Only 15 days ago, Singapore passed the Foreign Interference (Countermeasures) Act. It is legislation which allows the authorities to force social media platforms and Internet service providers to hand over user data, to block contacts and remove applications that share information considered by the authorities to be anti-state. Ms Emerlynne Gil, Amnesty International's deputy regional director for research, said: The passi…