Swords has good representation.

It is hard to overstate the anger among people about the increases in fuel today. We are in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis, a situation where people are in poverty, and where people are in arrears with bills. We are also in a situation where the Government has never taken in as much fuel tax in the history of the State, yet Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Green Party are hiking the cost of petrol and diesel. Some 670,000 people in this State are living in poverty. A quarter of all domestic gas customers are i…

I want to know why the Green Party, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil are fleecing families at this time of need.

The working poor.

A harsh one.

The Taoiseach's trip to Washington this year was defined by gaffes and mistakes. I was alarmed when he said about human trafficking: "It's not a particular issue for us in Ireland because our seas are so vast that people can't get there on small boats." I had to read it twice when I saw it reported from Washington. It will have come as a shock to anyone in the United States Government, which only a few years previously had put Ireland on the human trafficking watch list. Any Member of this House who has done an oun…

Yes, we know that.

No, I am not.

I am not saying that at all. If the Minister of State had listened to what I said, he would know I did not say that. Rather, I am saying that the child himself or herself is not involved in a criminal activity if he or she is being exploited sexually. The penalties in the Bill are weak. Child criminal exploitation is a form of human trafficking and should be considered a serious form of child abuse. The financial penalties associated with that need to be measured against the income generated by the criminal organis…

The Taoiseach's trip to Washington this year was defined by a number of gaffes. I was particularly alarmed by the statement he made on the topic of human trafficking, when he said, "It's not a particular issue for us in Ireland because our seas are so vast that people can't get there on small boats". I had to read this twice when I saw it reported from Washington. It may have come as a significant shock to the United States Government, which, only a few years earlier, had marked Ireland out as a watchlist country i…

The figures in the Farming Independent supplement of the Irish Independent showing that 200,000 cattle are to be culled by 2025, which is just in a year and a half, points to an incredible threat to the farming sector. It will be at a cost of about €600 million. A full 25% of the beef being imported to the European Union comes from Brazil. How is it environmentally friendly to fell large swaths of the Amazon to produce beef and for us to import that beef to substitute for Irish beef being culled in this State? Ther…

When the Taoiseach was Minister for Health he said that short of an asteroid hitting the planet, the national children's hospital would be built for €700 million by 2020. It is currently double the cost; it could end up at €2 billion and it will not have its doors open until 2025. The national children's hospital is just one of a long list of public capital projects that are way over budget. It seems that we if we put the word "national" in front of a capital project, we immediately increase the costs and lengthen …

The Taoiseach will have to agree that the commission of investigation system in Ireland is broken and in need of major reform. Investigations are never-ending vehicles that receive extension after extension and cost the taxpayer millions of euro. They produce reports that often end up on dusty shelves with very little consequences for those who are implicated in the reports. The commission of investigations system is often used by governments to kick issues into touch often for up to a decade and by then the Taoise…

The reduction in excise duty on fuel is due to lapse in two days' time. This will put an extra 5 cent on diesel and an extra 6 cent on petrol, which is a significant jump. It will hit families extremely hard. Hiking excise duty when so many families are in poverty and so many families are in arrears on energy bills is the opposite of what must be done at the moment. Figures released to me following parliamentary questions have shown that in terms of VAT and various other taxes, the Government is taking in huge reve…

It is still less than the increase.

I want to mention a tangential issue, namely, the crisis affecting nursing homes at present. The Ministers of State will be aware that nursing homes are closing right across the country and that many are blaming what they call fair deal discrimination. These nursing homes claim funding is insufficient to meet their spiralling inflation costs and the figures bear this out. Recently published figures from the HSE show that HSE nursing homes are currently receiving 70% more per resident than private nursing homes, whi…

The number of abortions has jumped a devastating 25% just in the last year. Some 8,500 unborn children were aborted last year and this figure is nearly triple the rate it was in 2017. That proves the predictions made by human rights campaigners in 2018, that the legislation, if implemented, would see a massive increase in lost lives. In the four years since the law was put in place, 31,000 babies have been aborted. This is equivalent to the population of Kilkenny city and for most people this is truly heartbreaking…

Under Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Green Party, Ireland is becoming a more violent and dangerous place. The Government is soft on crime and soft on the causes of crime. The Taoiseach just needs to look at the facts in that regard. Over the last number of years, the Government has hung the Garda out to dry in terms of underresourcing and understaffing. According to Eurostat figures in 2016, Ireland had the smallest per capita police force in the EU at 278 gardaí for every 100,000 people. That was 40 police officer…

Authorising is not recruiting. Last year, the Government authorised that recruitment of 1,000 gardaí and 116 were recruited. That is the difference between a press statement and the reality of the experience in society. The Government's policy is backfiring on people because crime and antisocial behaviour are going through the roof. Ireland has become a more violent place in recent years. Figures that we have obtained show that gardaí have seized 17,000 knives in the past year, an increase of 60% in a few short yea…

All those figures are correct. They have all gone up.