There was an interesting opinion poll a few weeks ago that showed only 27% of Irish people had a positive view of AI compared with 48% who believed that it would be a force for bad in the coming years. Research by RED C found that Irish people have among the lowest levels of trust in AI in the world. That demonstrates some good sense. Why? I think it is because people smell a rat. This is being forced down our throats by big tech and by propaganda from a Government that is in thrall to big tech. People get it. This…

I feel that every couple of weeks for the last number of years, I have been getting up here giving out about ghost buses, buses that are put out of order or are packed and people cannot get on them, buses that are cancelled, people waiting forever and people not being able to rely on basic public transport services in this country. There is no recognition by the Government of the fundamental issues. There are staffing shortages, which is an underlying issue, but there are also other issues. It is very clear that pr…

It is Government policy to slice and dice and privatise our routes in Dublin. By every metric of reliability, punctuality and penalties incurred, Go-Ahead is much worse than Dublin Bus. Why then is the Government persisting with privatising routes and giving them to Go-Ahead? Why are they not returned to Dublin Bus? Will the Government call a halt to the plans to privatise even more routes to Go-Ahead, including routes 56A, 65 and 77A, in light of all of the evidence shown that Go-Ahead provides a much worse servic…

I want to return to the issue of the €141 million paid by the public to the World Bank in advance of Paschal Donohoe taking up his new job. Yesterday the Taoiseach told me a formal business case was prepared by the Department of Finance and the low option was €141.4 million. I have read the business case. It lists a number of options. It lists option 3, which is the World Bank's envisaged level and what it was asking for - €131.4 million. It describes the €141.4 million as the higher level option, not the low optio…

We need to urgently debate the threat that Donald Trump and US imperialism pose to the entire world. The Taoiseach was at pains to downplay it earlier. We have seen nothing but a boot-licking craven response by the Irish establishment. At the start of this year, the US bombed Venezuela. It killed multiple Venezuelans as well as Cubans and kidnapped Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores.

The response to that from the Tánaiste was to say that the kidnapping was complex in terms of international law.

The UN Secretary General has been very clear that it is a breach. We need to discuss this and if the Government thinks it is okay for the US to go around kidnapping presidents it does not agree with.

What about the appeals?

Last weekend, the US ambassador attended a far-right conference in Meath. It was a who's who of the Irish far right - Malachy Steenson, Sharon Keogan, multi-billionaire businessman Declan Ganley, an array of transphobes and anti-choicers. The conference explicitly encouraged American interference by the American far-right in Irish politics. Presumably, the US ambassador was nodding along when the conference chair, Eddie Hobbs, told the audience to reach across the Atlantic and seek help from the US MAGA movement to…

Israel.

Is the Taoiseach at all concerned that it appears the public paid a €10 million sweetener to the World Bank to ease the way for Paschal Donohoe to get his high paying €600,000-a-year top job there? Was the Taoiseach made aware at any stage in the discussions that the World Bank was asking for €131 million? The Department officials were advising not to give any more than that anyway yet Paschal Donohoe decided that we would give an extra €10 million to make €141 million. Was there any sense at that stage that this p…

We would tackle big tech, yes. Correct. We would want that.

It seems we would be losing out on our country becoming a toxic waste ground. The new CRU large user policy enables further exponential expansion of data centres. It allows them to generate their own electricity using fossil fuels. The CRU is also allowing data centres to connect directly to the gas network in South Dublin County Council's area. How can the Government possibly say any of this is in line with our legal obligations to reduce both final energy consumption and carbon emissions?

Will the Minister of State expand on how it is possible to have a policy of exponential growth of data centres that are using fossil fuels? How does that coincide with what he says to the effect that this has to exist within the bounds of our climate targets. We are signed up to the EED, which has a legally binding target to reduce energy consumption by 11.7% by 2030. Ireland's target reduction is 16%. Yet, we have a decision paper from the CRU which states that medium-term electricity demand from data centres coul…

That is my question. The Minister of State is in the Department of the environment. He cannot just say something and then move on. It is completely illogical to say, on the one hand, that we are committed to this legally binding target of reducing energy consumption but, on the other, that we agree with a decision paper which states that our level of electricity usage will continue to grow and that this is going to be driven by the data centres. You have to pick one or the other. We will either reduce energy consum…

I did not say that.

By the time we come back in January, unless there is a change of approach by the British State, hunger strikers will again have died in British prisons. They will have been killed by an injustice system that arms, supports and funds genocide. Eight young people are currently on hunger strike in Britain. They are people who have been held without trial or bail for more than a year for protesting against British support for genocide. Qesser Zuhrah is on day 47 of her hunger strike. In 1981, Martin Hurson died after 4…

The Tánaiste's predecessor, Paschal Donohoe, said that there was no need for cost-of-living payments in the budget because “inflation has now returned to normal rates”. He said that inflation would be around 2% this year. That is clearly not the case. We have over 4% food price inflation and 3.3% energy price inflation. It is going to be a cold hard Christmas for many people. At this very late stage, I am asking the Tánaiste to bring forward emergency cost-of-living payments.

The truth is we are going to have the highest inflation rates in two years. They are not back to the extremely high rates we saw before that, but they are high. The whole premise upon which the Government justified not continuing with the cost-of-living payments was that inflation had returned to normal rates. There was a logic set out that has been confounded by reality, yet the Government is sticking with its position of no return of one-off payments. The Minister knows that the impact of the withdrawal of one-of…

What is the Minister talking about?