I have contributed to many of these debates because, like many others, I appreciate the hardship that people are going through and because Fingal is situated in my constituency. On the one hand, I welcome that there is a scheme proposed for Fingal, Wexford and other counties in terms of remediation for defective concrete blocks. Piecemeal as it is, as many others have said, I will not be opposing it. However, no more than the rest of it, the scheme is still not fit for purpose. It is not sufficient for people who n…

I would like to visit the issue of people being able to build modular homes in their gardens and subdivide them because it is a hugely important issue. It is definitely not a panacea for the housing crisis but it will help in certain situations. For example, yesterday I had a gentleman on to me worried that the legislation will not cover an area where the person who has a big enough house and wants to live on the garden and rent out the house. There are a lot of older people who want to live in the ground floor of …

Yes, for families but not investor-landlords.

The Government seriously needs to reassess and reconfirm its commitment to imminently provide the full extension and refurbishment project promised to Lucan Community College going back to 2010. We are talking about dedicated classrooms for children with special educational needs, physical education space and refurbishment. The current piecemeal solution of a reduced phase 1 and temporary repurposing of some rooms for special educational needs and reviewing the situation in relation to the originally promised phase…

The school has had to take the decision to subdivide rooms and to move students in order to have special educational needs classes in a setting that is not going to disturb students. I will give a few quotes from parents. Parents have said that every month that passes is actively harming children, that the school is not fit for purpose, that children with additional needs have been failed despite explicit promises and that children are stressed, more constrained and are falling behind through no fault of their own.…

As Deputy Cummins said, Ireland declared a climate and biodiversity emergency back in 2019. This motion aims to renew that because absolutely nothing has happened. It is a bit like St. Augustine when he said, "Grant me chastity and continence, Lord, but not yet". We talk the talk, but we never walk the climate action walk, and that is a depressing fact. I do not have time in two minutes to talk about biodiversity but my statements on biodiversity were made quite recently and are on the Dáil record. However, I do wa…

Cuirim fáilte roimh an Aire Stáit. I note that in Brussels in March, the key areas were again Ukraine and the €195 billion or so in support. Since then, we have had the Hungarian election, which, as others have noted, will hopefully free things up. I hope that at the informal meeting in Cyprus tomorrow and the day after, we will receive some signs of positive engagement from the Hungarian side, if we have not already done so.

I missed that because I was at a committee meeting. It is fantastic to hear. The Middle East is going to come up again, I am sure, just as it did before. You never know from one day to the next what is going to happen. The last thing I heard related to the status of the blockade. I know matters are complex because of the historical and neighbourly relations some member states have with Israel, but we seem to be letting the genocide, the occupation of Gaza and the occupied territories fall through the cracks. I am a…

I welcome this Bill. I have been critical of the Government in lots of areas but I have to say that this legislation is a positive further step in protecting the health of all our citizens but especially our children. It would be remiss of me not to be a bit critical and say that I am not sure if it is enough in itself because we are dealing with what I would call a subversive and well-resourced industry. We think back to the Philip Morris days in the 1950s. The industry is still finding clever ways to sneak in and…

I want to spend some time addressing an issue I have referenced before, namely the growing crisis of so-called parking wars and the service charge-related instability that is turning home ownership into a nightmare in many of our new communities. I give the examples of the Clonburris and Adamstown strategic development zones, SDZs, in my constituency, with which my independent colleague Councillor Helen Farrell, who I welcome to the Public Gallery, will be all too familiar, as will the Minister of State, Deputy Eme…

The council is only implementing the legislation it is told to implement. When I tried to get a major department store into the Adamstown SDZ, council officials refused and said it would upset the retail hierarchy because Tallaght and Liffey Valley are the two main retail centres. Therefore, anyone living in Adamstown has to go to Liffey Valley. Buses on the L51 and L52 routes do not turn up half of the time, so people are going to have to drive to do a proper shop. Unfortunately, they cannot get the train to Liffe…

I welcome the opportunity to speak on the Air Pollution (Amendment) Bill 2025. This is legislation we have been promised for a fair couple of years and attempts to respond to a very real public health challenge that often does not get as much attention as it should. It also updates a framework that we have not kept pace with in terms of the scale of the problem across the country. The EPA air quality in Ireland 2023 report reminds us that air pollution, according to those figures, causes an estimated 1,700 prematur…

We are moving the focus in the debate towards solutions for people to reduce their energy bills. I welcome this motion. As I said before, we need to be moving towards giving better grants for solar in households, including in the very short term plug-in solar. You can now go into Lidl in the UK and get some of these, which would cut your bills straight away. The focus of much of the debate has been on the short-term pressure and how the Government did not respond enough or fast enough to it. We have said that. I fi…

I am a great sports fan. I play GAA. I play five-a-side, six-a-side and eight-a-side in Celbridge and Leixlip. Some might have seen me with a crutch in here which I lent to another Deputy. Of course, some rag put it all over social media. The reason I had the crutch in the first place is because my knee is damaged from playing eight-a-side last Friday when I went in full belt in a tackle and someone's knee went through the side of my knee. I would do it 100 times over to be able to play football. That is what so ma…

Just to interrupt for a second, can I say it was great to play against the Minister of State in Boyle?

With the malevolent Trump Administration, we need to closer links with Canada through the EU and this legislation is clearly facilitating what is essentially a trade-off with pluses and minuses. The question is not about whether we are losing sovereignty but whether sovereignty is worth giving up in certain situations, and I believe it is. We have agreed to pool sovereignty at EU level in multiple areas. The Supreme Court decision stated CETA created a parallel system of justice but it did not say the ICS was uncon…

The nub of the issue is that the Bill is before the House because of a Supreme Court decision and the Costello judgment. We are going to have differences of opinion on it. There was a 4:3 split in the judgment but a 6:1 majority said that while it is unconstitutional, it does not require a referendum because the State can change Irish law to put in place strict safeguards to make sure Irish sovereignty and EU sovereignty are protected in the context of the Bill. This is why we have the arbitration amendment in sect…

It is no surprise to hear me say that I will not be voting confidence in this Government. As I said just after the election, the Government's the programme for Government and the groups it did deals with to keep it in power did not inspire any confidence or show any vision. It's choices during the last budget favoured wealthy developers, left vulnerable people in the lurch and the Government's lack of urgency on the need to ramp up our energy security has been frustrating. People in my constituency cannot get affor…

Let her speak.

Lads, everyone has a right to speak, even if you do not like them.