Correct the record, Taoiseach.

You misled the House. The Taoiseach claimed he visited when the war was not under way, but it was well under way.

It was under way.

The Taoiseach's propaganda visit took place when the genocide was happening. He misled the House.

The lecturers of the BIMM music college have been forced onto the picket lines. They face an incredible assault on their rights, with 53 workers facing redundancy. A small number of them will be re-employed on less than half the hourly wage they were on previously and the rest will be faced with the choice of getting bogus self-employment on zero-hour contracts. This is part of the so-called "Uberisation" of academic conditions. The State cannot wash its hands of what is happening here. Approximately 80% of the stu…

-----TU Dublin should tell BIMM to back off or else it will not be able to continue with this arrangement?

It is mostly funded by the State.

Normally, the Taoiseach reads the response first and then we speak.

The programme for Government refers to reforming the triple lock legislation. It was reported last Friday that a draft law to end the triple lock will shortly be brought to Cabinet. Will the Taoiseach provide some detail on this? In what way is the triple lock going to be ended or reformed? Back in 2013, the Taoiseach, who was not then Taoiseach, hit the nail on the head when he said that the triple lock was at the core of our neutrality and described the attempt to remove it as an out-of-touch ideological obsessio…

You believed it in 2013.

No. It does not.

The Taoiseach is the last man standing from the Fianna Fáil Governments that blew up the property bubble and then saw the whole thing come crashing down and ordinary people paid the price for a decade or so. It seems the Taoiseach is committed to going back to the future. He is resurrecting the same policies that caused the 2008 financial crash. At the weekend, it was tax breaks for developers, whom the banking inquiry, the Housing Commission and many others found to be instrumental in blowing up that bubble. There…

Why did you not say this during the election?

The quickest, easiest and most immediate response to the housing crisis is to deal with the scourge of vacancy and dereliction. In almost every estate in Dublin South-West one will find vacant houses. These are perfectly good homes or they were at one stage. They could be used to house families. Instead, they are a blight on the community. We got figures recently that 14,500 of the more than 100,000 vacant properties in the country are located in Dublin. There are more than 10,000 families in emergency accommodatio…

I am sharing time with Deputy Healy. I will leave at least three minutes for him, maybe more. We will see. Here we are with the first Bill of this Dáil and this Government, and we are off to an extremely bad start, both procedurally, because the debate is being guillotined, and with respect to what the Government is proposing. We are having a short Second Stage debate and then we will be straight into our amendments, all of which have been ruled out of order. We will have a tiny amount of time for that and then - b…

First, I am disappointed that my proposed amendment and the amendment from Deputy Gibney were ruled out of order. I understand the reason given was that they were not in line with the spirit of the Bill. Deputy Gibney's amendment sought to have the maximum number of junior Ministers set at 20, while I sought to have it set at 15. It seems to me that this is legislation changing the number of junior Ministers. I wonder whether, if we had changed the proposed figure from 20 to 24, it would have been in order. Are we …

Is the Minister not embarrassed to have his first act in this Government and in this Dáil be such a stroke and to be so blatant in sharing out the spoils of political office? Is he not embarrassed to have to trot out the line that "Oh, it is really about the size of the population and we need more people" and so on? Does it not cause him to cringe even a little bit inside to so blatantly make Ministers of one sort or another not far off one in two Government TDs? Does he not see it is very blatant and obvious to pe…

The programme for Government refers to "all parties and groupings party to the Government". My question is simple. Which groupings are party to the Government and what agreements exist with them? Elsewhere, the programme for Government refers to support resources being made available to "others who support the Government". Who is being referred to there? Am I right in assuming that the groupings referred to are the Lowry group and the Healy-Rae group and that the others being referred to are those members of those …

It says "groupings", though, and that is what I am asking the Tánaiste about.

Who are the groupings? It says "groupings". Who are they?