Does the Minister agree that the current system is broken and the privatised model which depends on inadequate public funding does not work from the points of view of childcare workers, parents or many small providers? TASC produced a report last week which concluded that the single most important factor in knowing the pay and conditions of care work is the extent to which it is marketised and that for care work to be well paid, it needs to be publicly resourced and its wages set above what would be fetched in the …

Last year, the HSA had a budget of just €20 million, which is less than the budget for Deputies' secretaries. The Government allocated an extra €4 million for the HSA in this week's budget, but that is a drop in the ocean in the context of what is needed, as we have seen over the course of the last year. Is the Minister of State satisfied with this? Given the current pandemic, and in light of what we have seen in meat plants, in particular, but also in other workplaces, does he agree that we need serious investment…

Last year, there were fewer workplace inspectors than there were dog wardens in the country. There are roughly the same number of workplace inspectors as there are special advisers for the Government. The HSA is the body tasked with inspecting workplaces. It was the agency appointed in the pandemic to ensure that workers' lives and health were not being put at risk by penny-pinching bosses but all the indications are that the Government turned a blind eye to the meat factories and to workplaces generally. That is r…

There is no question about the skill or the dedication of the inspectors but the bottom line is that there simply is not enough of them. That was demonstrated towards the start of last year when the virus was running rampant through meat factories with no inspections for well over a month, after which the point was flagged. That should have been an extreme warning bell for the Government that there was a problem but we have allocated an extra €4 million. How many inspectors will that hire? We know now that there ar…

I responded to the core parts of the budget on Tuesday evening and will focus now on how it will do nothing for workers. I will speak particularly about three different groups of workers in a struggle, the first of whom are the Debenhams workers. They have now been involved in a dispute with their former employer for more than six months, since they were thrown on the scrapheap in a tactical insolvency. Incidentally, it was a tactical insolvency that the company was able to carry out because of the failure of the p…

I wish to draw attention to something the Ceann Comhairle mentioned at the start of today's debate. He asked all Deputies not to distribute the contents of the budget before the budget speeches were completed. We were not permitted to take the documents out of the room, but the Tánaiste did just that. Before the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform had even stood up to deliver his speech, the Tánaiste had tweeted out large parts of the budget which were contained in the speech that was yet to be given. Perhap…

Who else supports carbon taxes? Big oil: ExxonMobil in the US lobbies in favour of a carbon tax. It does that because it knows that carbon taxes are not effective, because they want to deflect from the kind of green new deal programmes that have been put forward by AOC and others in the US and because they want to discredit the environmental movement. They want to associate it, not with a green new deal and socialist policies that transform people's lives for the better while tackling climate change, but with makin…

I would like the Minister to come back and explain what is happening here in some detail. The explanatory note we were sent, to which Deputy Boyd Barrett referred, simply says that the resolution amends the balancing charge rules in section 288 of the Taxes Consolidation Act 1997 to ensure that Ireland's tax regime for intellectual property is fully consistent with international best practice. That is just not good enough when asking people to vote on something important tonight. We get this note and are then expec…

Yes, but only briefly. I thank the Minister, Deputy O'Gorman, for that explanation, which satisfies me in respect of Financial Resolution No. 4. I will make a brief point in response to what the Tánaiste has said. I refer to the idea that loopholes are just found by very smart lawyers and then are very quickly closed by the Government, as it moves to stop any kind of tax avoidance. That is patently ridiculous and is not what happens. That is like the Cayman Islands claiming to have slipped and fallen, and then acci…

What was the Tánaiste doing on Monday night?

The Minister and the Government made a very grave mistake this week by not following the public health advice. The consequence of that mistake is that we will still go to level 5, but we will do so later, for longer and after unnecessary deaths. That is a decision the Government made against the explicit opinion of NPHET that "[a] graduated approach will not have sufficient or timely impact on the trajectory and scale of the disease and will not protect the core priorities". This is clearly a Government decision. T…

I will offer some quick-fire questions. When the Minister spoke to the Taoiseach before the NPHET meeting, did he discuss level 4? On a separate issue, I note the Minister published a kind of propaganda video boasting about the great things the Government has done in its first 100 days and threatening us with more to come. Who paid for that video? Is it a Department of Health publication, in which case it is paid for by the public, or is it a Fianna Fáil or a personal Deputy Stephen Donnelly effort?

The Tánaiste, Deputy Leo Varadkar, surprised the nation on Monday night not by his cynical attack on NPHET, not by his undermining of public health advice in general in an extremely dangerous way, but by his newfound concern for ordinary people. All of a sudden, Deputy Leo Varadkar is a champion of mental health, opposed to poverty and stands up for the ordinary worker. He forgot how it was his Government which slashed the budget for mental health in the last term. He forgot that, just last week, he voted against a…

There are two issues I want to speak about. The first is the very good news that emerged from Athens a few hours ago on the conviction of the fascist organisation Golden Dawn. The top leaders of that organisation have been convicted of running a criminal organisation. Its members have been convicted of the murder in 2013 of 34-year-old rapper Pavlos Fyssas, a left-wing activist. Golden Dawn has been convicted of the attempted murder of Egyptian fishermen and a brutal assault on communist trade union activists of th…

It is not agreed.

I do not see how we can have a Dáil sitting today that does not debate the rejection of the clear public health advice by the Government and the Tánaiste's undermining of that public health advice in a very cynical and dangerous way on RTÉ television last night. Lives will unfortunately be lost as a result of the Government’s decision. The approach will not avoid going to level 5; it will simply mean going to level 5 later and for longer, potentially into Christmas, after lives have been lost in nursing homes and i…

That is the Government's proposal.

One point I heard made was the idea that sitting until midnight on Wednesday in some way comes from the Opposition. It does not. That is a proposal from the Government at the Dáil reform committee, the idea that we use the Convention Centre on a Wednesday and sit until midnight. We could continue to do votes on a Thursday and it seems clear to me that the incentive behind that is the idea of people leaving Dublin early on a Thursday. There is no need for that. We could be sitting late on Thursday. The other point I…

Many people will have been surprised to see the Tánaiste last night become a new convert to concern about poverty, mental health and ordinary workers. If they thought that was real, they will be quickly disabused of the notion when they hear about the decision of the Cabinet today to increase the minimum wage by a miserly 10 cent, from €10.10 per hour to €10.20 per hour, which is an increase of less than 1% - this for the workers on the front line who have been stocking the supermarket shelves, selling the goods an…

In the summer the Government had the opportunity to follow New Zealand and crush Covid. Instead, it turned a blind eye to the outbreaks in meat factories, ignored the calls for sick pay for workers and wound down the level of testing. It took the decision to accelerate through the phases and to reopen the economy, under pressure of lobbying from businesses and for the image of the then Taoiseach, now Tánaiste, Deputy Varadkar. Unfortunately, the same approach of allowing the interests of private, short-term profit …