I asked a question about social media posting by Tesco workers.

The independent review panel on senior public service recruitment and pay processes recently delivered its final report to the Minister for Public Expenditure, National Development Plan Delivery and Reform. That fundamentally puts the ball in the court of the Government in terms of deciding whether top civil servants - Mr. Watt is on close to €300,000, others are on €200,000 and some are in between - will get big pay increases of 10% to 15%. Has the Government discussed the outcome of that? Has the Government discu…

I thank the Leas-Cheann Comhairle. Yesterday, the Data Protection Commission fined the Department of Health €22,500 for excessive and disproportionate eliciting of sensitive personal details about the private lives of people who had taken legal action against the State over access to supports for children with special educational needs. It came after the exposure of this practice by Mr. Shane Corr, a whistleblower in the Department of Health who spoke about the practice of collecting sensitive medical and personal …

The latest figures show there are 12,441 people in emergency accommodation, including an incredible 3,699 children. That is more people than live in Rush, Portmarnock or Skerries in the Minister’s constituency. When these figures came out, the Minister effectively said to the media that they vindicated the decision to end the eviction ban; however, since the ban ended, the figures have risen month after month and are likely to continue to do so as a consequence of that decision.

That is cold comfort to the 12,441 people who are homeless now. The Minister made the point, which is true, that the staggered nature of the ending of the eviction ban has had an impact. It meant we did not have the tsunami in one fell swoop. That is true, but we in the Opposition never said it would come in one fell swoop. I am not an expert in tsunamis, but I get the impression they build and build, a qualitative point is reached and then they overwhelm people. That is what I am experiencing in terms of people co…

We do not.

We do not need a private rental sector.

We do not need a private rental sector. It is not true. We need homes for people to live in and affordable rents for them. The landlords the Minister spoke about exiting the market cannot bring the homes with them. They do not strap the apartments to their backs, get on a boat and leave; the properties remain here. They cannot remove them. We simply need the State to step in, in every circumstance in which that happens, to buy the property and convert people into tenants of the State and give them security of tenur…

No criteria; everybody should be entitled to be a tenant of the State and to a differential rent. The entire and central problem of the whole Government strategy is that it is obsessed with incentivising the private sector. I ask the Minister, how many is too many? What is the target for when there will be zero people in emergency accommodation? His predecessors had targets for ending homelessness - for Joan Burton, it was 2016, and for the Minister, Deputy Coveney, it was July 2016 as well, or possibly 2017. What …

We are not saying end it. The Minister knows that is not what we are saying.

I will ask the Minister a simple question. Does she agree that all social welfare payments should be increased at least in line with the rate of inflation in the forthcoming budget? The Government did not do this in the last budget and the result has been that the poorest people in our society got poorer as a consequence of the decisions the Government made. These consequences are that more people are in deprivation, at risk of poverty and using food banks.

The Government has been found wanting. More people are at risk of poverty, using food banks and in deprivation. That is the consequence of the Government's decision to increase social welfare rates and so on by less than the rate of inflation, along with lots of other decisions it has made. The Minister referred to the increase of €12, or 5.7%, in the latest budget. Inflation last year was 8.1% and it was running at 6.6% to May this year. As the Minister will undoubtedly know, the real rate of inflation for the poo…

The Government prioritised once-off payments. The vast majority of the payments the Minister listed are once-off but the price increases are permanent. They are not going to go down. Groceries are not going to decrease in price to where they were a couple of years ago. If inflation goes down, prices do not go down. It is just that the rate of increase is reduced. Unless the Minister actually matches social welfare payments to the inflation that people in the most deprived sections of our communities are feeling, th…

First, I salute the workers at Tara Mines, who have mounted a protest today. The way they are being treated by their employer, Boliden, is horrendous. They are facing shortly the loss of their jobs and wages and the huge impact that will have on their community. The measure is supposedly temporary, but they are not being given any date or timeframe for when the mine will be back in operation. Tara Mines has been profitable through the past 13 years. No real justification has been put forward by the company for this…

If they evade the pay caps though-----

Kyphectomy surgeries at Temple Street hospital have been paused since 7 November last year while an internal and external review of spinal surgeries carried out on children with spina bifida over the past three years is being carried out. These reviews are taking place on foot of a much higher complication rate than would be usual and with allegations that unlicensed implants have been used in children. I understand that a draft report of the external review has now been sent to hospital management and that the Min…

I trust Deputy Crowe is opposed to greyhound racing as well then.

I raise an issue regarding the operation of the investment fund landlord LRC RE-1. It is based in Luxembourg and has assets estimated at €6 billion. It began buying property in Ireland in 2016 and now owns an estimated 1,700 homes across the State. Having bought these properties, LRC RE-1 unsuccessfully attempted to flip them in 2021. LRC RE-1, trading as Jersia Limited, is evicting multiple residents from their homes at Applewood in Swords. In each case, the residents are families with children who have nowhere el…

Does that include HAP?

Last week, Deputy Bríd Smith and I met a group of Tesco workers, who are so-called dot.com workers. In other words, they are the workers who pick the products if one orders online on tesco.com . They have to pick between 180 and 190 products per hour, and they are the delivery drivers who deliver that shopping to people's doors. During the Covid-19 pandemic, these were the people who made sure that vulnerable people were able to get their groceries on a week-to-week basis but they are being treated horrendously by …