The Taoiseach has not addressed the question I asked regarding this case-----

Many of these deaths are as a result of a failure of State care. I will give him other examples. The Government is using special emergency arrangements at the moment to accommodate children. These are often unregulated, rented accommodations provided by third-parties with questionable vetting standards. Children are going missing every month and these children are being exposed to sexual exploitation. I have raised these cases practically every month for the last five years in this House, as have other organisation…

-----it is the polar opposite of that. It is really important that we get to the heart of the fatal dysfunction that exists in our childcare system currently in this country.

Will the Taoiseach ask for the Minister, Tusla and CAMHS to be brought before the children's committee to focus on this fatal dysfunction?

The Taoiseach can ask, like any TD here can.

The issue of Government waste is creating great frustration and fury among the general public, from the children's hospital to the Gucci bike shed. The most recent revelation is that the vacant distillery building in Smithfield has cost the State €12 million and has not had people using it. When the Taoiseach was Minister for Health, his Department measured a building incorrectly and spent €10 million on space that did not exist, which is incredible. During Covid, the Government purchased 100 ventilators that did n…

This is the issue of Government waste, which is a massive topic, I understand. Those ventilators are still being stored. What is going to happen to those ventilators that cost €100,000, that do not work and that are still being stored? Will the Government use them somewhere as a national monument to Government waste, to be able to celebrate what the Government has done?

Flippant?

That is not the case. You know I am not saying that. The Taoiseach is twisting the question in a horrendous fashion.

I am talking about waste. I am not talking about the treatment of Covid, and the Taoiseach knows that.

The Taoiseach is out of order.

You are answering a different question.

What is going to happen to the ventilators? The question was about the ventilators.

Care in this country is met with rhetoric rather than resources. At the start of this year we had the care referendum, when the Government promised a new era, but when we look at the delivery of care, including children in State care which I mentioned earlier, nursing home care and childcare, we see that resources are not nearly enough to deliver what should be a decent level of care in these sectors. The provision of childcare is a public good but it is more than this. It is a necessity for many families who simpl…

I welcome the amendments that have deleted the censorship elements of the Bill. I have no doubt they are being ditched because of the groundswell of opposition against the Bill in its former state. I have no doubt that Simon Harris is better at reading opinion polls than Leo Varadkar. That is probably one of the reasons we have seen this significant change in recent times. In truth, this Bill has been a fiasco. Whatever way you look at it, it is a mess of the Minister's making. I have never seen a Minister come int…

Housing is the biggest single failure of the Government without a shadow of a doubt. Statistics released to Aontú under the Freedom of Information Act have shown that 400 people have died homeless on the streets of Dublin since 2018. This is a shocking figure. An average of ten people were dying on the streets of Dublin in homelessness in the latter months of last year. We know that 14,486 people are officially on the homeless register at present, a figure that keeps increasing under the Government. A total of 10,0…

This is an enormously difficult issue. Many people have seen their loved ones die in extraordinarily difficult situations and many people will be motivated by compassion on this issue. I have no doubt but that some of the campaigners who are looking for assisted suicide are also motivated by compassion. I have no doubt that is the case. However, I believe the introduction of assisted suicide is a very dangerous step and one that crosses a significant Rubicon in terms of the protection of the most vulnerable people …

Okay. Apologies for that. I was disappointed that the committee ignored much of the scientific professional expert advice. Assisted suicide goes against the advice of the majority of consultants in palliative care. No group works with greater compassion, experience or knowledge than those who are working in palliative care. Their association opposes moves to introduce assisted suicide. The Association for Palliative Care Medicine in Britain has opposed previous efforts to introduce assisted suicide. Disability righ…

I have never seen a Finance Bill in the history of the State that seeks to buy the votes of citizens so brazenly. It is incredible. Even the one-off payments are designed to happen just before and after the election. This is not the Government’s money it is using to buy votes, but the citizens’, which it is leveraging to put itself back into government. Fine Gael has been in power for 13 years. Fianna Fáil has been in power for the past-----

It has been eight years. Fianna Fáil was in a confidence and supply arrangement with the then Government, which meant the latter only existed because of Fianna Fáil’s support. It is like this Government is trying to hypnotise the people of Ireland with shiny coins to make them forget what has happened over the past ten years. That is wrong. The Finance Bill should have had four major objectives. It should have addressed the important issue of capacity within our infrastructure. The Government has ramped up cash inp…