I appreciate the answer, but the Minister of State knows as well as I do that it does not actually answer any of the points that I raised. I am hoping that in her two-minute supplementary response the Minister of State will address these issues. I appreciate that she gave the answer she was provided with, but this is causing real concern for task forces across the country. I will repeat the basic points I made in my initial contribution. First, there is a cut to core funding of the task forces because no funding is…

Will they be included in the reference group?

I thank the Labour Party for bringing forward this motion. Decriminalisation of all drugs has been the policy of People Before Profit for very many years. We were delighted to see that this was finally adopted as a consensus cross-party position in the interim report of the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Drugs Use, which was then chaired by Gino Kenny. The report was published last October. The interim report recommended that decriminalisation of possession for personal use should apply equally to all illicit drugs.…

Smaller apartments.

It was very strange yesterday on Leaders' Questions. I counted no fewer than seven times when Jack Chambers, stepping in for the Taoiseach, called for a debate on our migration policy. This is kind of the last refuge of the scoundrel. Rather than actually coming out and arguing for a position, they just say we need to have a debate about it, suggesting that somehow they are not able to have a debate. They are able to have a debate; they are the Ministers responsible for Government policy. It has become clear that w…

I wrote to the Business Committee seeking a debate on safety for asylum seekers after we saw the horrific attack and what seems to be attempted murder with the attempted burning alive of a baby and children in Drogheda. This was not an isolated incident but one of over 30 arson attacks on asylum centres in what we are seeing as a campaign of far-right terror in this State. We need to be debating it. There is a direct line between the dog-whistling of Government leaders and the scapegoating of asylum seekers based o…

Could we add "safety" to the title rather than it being about "enforcement"?

They are not agreed.

Over 1,000 workers have been left in a desperate situation by Fastway Couriers going into receivership. These are direct workers and workers from franchisees. They have all been left being owed back pay or a back month of pay. They are owed wages. They should be owed redundancy. They are now struggling to pay bills and mortgages. However, they have been told they are effectively locked out for a month from accessing social welfare. They have been told they are still legally working for Fastway for 30 days from the …

I move amendment No. 1: To insert the following after "or an incumbent to nominate a presidential candidate": "; and — amend the law to allow a petition signed by a minimum of 35,000 people who are eligible to vote in a presidential election to nominate a presidential candidate.". Before I start on the topic, I seek a little leeway, given the events that have happened in Saggart over the last number of days, to express my utter horror, condemnation and disgust at the alleged sexual assault of a ten-year-old girl. M…

Okay. The people who are driving this Spoil the Vote process are part of the elite. They are not anti-establishment at all. They are a different, more socially conservative part of the elite than Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. They are the Opus Dei wing of the establishment - wealthy fundamentalist Catholics who want to drag us back to the Ireland of the Magdalen laundries, the mother and baby homes and the industrial schools. They want to make divorce and contraception illegal again. They want to abolish choice and bo…

I did not mention anyone. It is for people to assume which of the candidates is which. One of the candidates is someone who defends freedom of speech and ordinary people's right to criticise the European Union, wants to protect neutrality, condemns the genocide in Gaza and all who have supported it, stands with carers and disabled people and voted again and again to ban evictions. People have a choice. One of the candidates is going to win.

Yes, absolutely, and people will vote on that basis.

Toothless.

There has been shockingly little coverage of the scandal of the illegal felling of over 30 acres of native broadleaf trees and mature hedgerows in Cork that date back to at least the 1800s, if not earlier. It was revealed by The Journal after an FOI to the National Parks and Wildlife Service last week discovered that nearly 2 km of ancient, long-established hedgerows with high biodiversity value for local wildlife were removed. Despite being refused permission to access the site via Coillte forestry lands, people c…

Not agreed.

Can I ask whether we are going to schedule a debate about the new principle being espoused by a presidential candidate that TDs should have to declare previous professional work relating to a topic before speaking on it in the Dáil? For example, the Minister of justice, who I thought spoke well on this yesterday, would have to declare, before he spoke about violence, if he was ever involved in defending a murderer. It would then be assumed that he was sympathetic to murderers as a result. Does the Government not pr…

I want to ask about transport infrastructure, of which buses are the easiest, quickest and cheapest part to deploy. Every day, pretty much, I get emails about the state of the bus services in Ballycullen, Knocklyon and Rathfarnham. The 15 bus service is the busiest route in Dublin and the 15B is also grossly overcrowded. What is happening is that buses routinely fill up in the morning after the first few stops and then leave everyone behind at the later stops. This is a daily occurrence. One constituent says: I now…

The Taoiseach's former Cabinet colleague and now preferred choice for President, Heather Humphreys, took part in a radio debate about a week ago during which she said that Irish troops should not be stopped from being sent to Ukraine by a Russian veto. Is that the Taoiseach's position? Is he in favour of sending Irish troops to Ukraine without Russian consent? Doing so would mean placing their lives in very serious danger because they would be seen as hostile forces by Russia if they were sent there despite its opp…

The right of ordinary people in Ukraine to decide what their future is. I am against sending Irish troops to participate----