It is 3%.

Put the houses on planes and fly them out.

I ask the Tánaiste to go outside to meet the students who will sleep out overnight to highlight the student accommodation crisis. They will tell him this is the worst the crisis has ever been. They will tell him stories about the very many students who still have no accommodation, who are commuting long distances every day, who are paying extortionate money in hotel fees or who are couch-surfing. As their slogan states, "No Keys, No Degrees". It is an unsustainable situation. As it stands, students will not be able…

For over a year, Debenhams workers waged a heroic struggle against the loss of their jobs and their treatment by their employer. In many respects, their struggle epitomised the treatment of some workers by some employers in the course of the pandemic. Yesterday, the Government announced that employees who had lost their job during Covid would now be able to seek redundancy and it announced a special payment to workers who have lost out on reckonable service as a consequence of the pandemic. The statement also said …

Not agreed. It is almost three weeks since the Government launched its Housing for All plan. The Dáil did not debate it last week and we will not debate it this week. It is inappropriate that the Government gets to launch its plan with great fanfare and talk of 300,000 homes by the end of 2030, the majority of which are simply estimates of what private developers will build, without it being debated here. There is a danger that all the flaws in the plan will be exposed before there is even a debate in the House. Co…

-----in the context of inflation. We need to have a debate in the House.

Earlier, my colleague, Deputy Barry, raised the horrific treatment by Aer Lingus of its workers. Unfortunately, they are not the only group of workers within aviation facing severe attacks on their terms and conditions. The management of Dublin Airport Authority took advantage of the pandemic to ram through a series of attacks on workers' terms and conditions and to undermine them. The consequences of the so-called new ways of working were clearly evident a couple of weeks ago when there were massive queues at secu…

I will share time with Deputy Barry. The sorry saga of this special deal for property owners and developers tells a very important truth about the nature of the housing crisis. We do not have a housing crisis just because no one has figured out what to do to resolve it. If you go out onto the street and campaign on the issue of housing, the average person that you meet will have the essentials of what needs to happen. We need a ban on economic evictions, we need rent controls to bring rents down to affordable level…

The programme for Government talks about tackling low pay and improving the minimum wage but it seems even the currently inadequate minimum wage is being violated by companies through internship schemes. I have written to the Tánaiste and to the Workplace Relations Commission, WRC, about one such scheme in Creedon's Dog Care in Cork, which sees interns expected to work from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. completely free for 60 days doing a mix of dog grooming and office work. They even want some of their interns to pay the compa…

Me.

He lied.

He told untruths.

It is quite striking that amid all the praise of the Minister, Deputy Coveney, as a great statesman and everything else, there has been an absence of a repetition by the Government of the detailed narrative that he put forward to cover up clear cronyism. I think that is because to simply lay out fact after supposed fact would reveal how ridiculous this is. I will go through a few issues with what the Minister claims. He claims there was no lobbying for this position. He slightly revised his position at the second c…

The Deputy does not have to vote confidence in him.

I will open with some quotes from leading Fine Gael politicians. First, "I do not, as standard, keep text messages" was not said by the Minister, Deputy Coveney, but by the Tánaiste on 5 November 2020. On 31 August 2021, Deputy Coveney stated: "I do not hold on to text messages for long periods in terms of data on my phone and so on." On 7 September 2021, he also stated that he cleared texts from his phones regularly when business was done, or something like that. At the risk of pointing out the obvious, that is no…

I join in thanking all the staff for all the work that has been done over the past seven months in very difficult circumstances. For years, People Before Profit has called for an end to Ireland's tax haven status. We have pointed out that not only is it immoral but it is completely unsustainable. The Government has continually responded over the years by saying that it cannot take action unilaterally and it cannot take action at a European level but it must be as part of a global process. We now have a global proce…

We are back to facing a significant crisis of unemployment continuing into next year. The Government’s response is to roll out the old hits and the same old strategies. I am expecting the slogan, "Welfare cheats cheat us all", to be brought out and the individualisation of the problem of unemployment. An important part of that is the work placement experience programme. This is a new free labour scheme for bosses on which workers will get less than the pandemic unemployment payment and are expected to live below th…

I thank the Minister for her answer, which is kind of funny. The funny bit is the claim that it is an entirely new scheme. It is as if the Government knows that the old JobBridge scheme was so widely hated and discredited that it is practically telling us not to worry because it is not JobBridge. If the Government knows how hated and rotten that scheme was, why did it not take on board the consultants' recommendations? Why did it ignore the vast majority of the recommendations made in the report it commissioned? Th…

I am sharing time with Deputy Barry. The socialist left is the only political force in Ireland that has consistently told the truth to people about Covid. That was epitomised by the discussion on the reopening of hospitality in November of last year, when the Government bowed to private business lobbying and reopened at the cost of more than 2,000 unnecessary, fully avoidable deaths. The rest of the Opposition went along with that and, in general, the approach in the course of the pandemic was to go along with the …

I will share time with Deputy Gino Kenny if he arrives on time. He is in Leinster House. I will start by making one positive comment about the Rural Independent Group. It has been consistent on Covid-19. It has been consistently wrong, but consistent nonetheless. At every point of the Covid crisis, it has been in favour of opening up and letting Covid rip and has consistently downplayed the dangers the pandemic presents. What the Rural Independent Group wanted was implemented in November last year when the Governme…