Who oversees that? It is a Tory Government.

I am sharing time with Deputies Mythen, Patricia Ryan, Gould and Clarke. I know a little more than most about this subject. I was on the national executive of the Irish National Organisation of the Unemployed many years ago when these job clubs and local employment services were being put together. We were part of the team that worked around a community based response, working with people who were unemployed to put together tailor-made training programmes to help them get back into the world of work. This is good f…

My colleague an Teachta O'Rourke has already outlined Sinn Féin's approach to this Bill. We see it as a missed opportunity and hope the Minister of State will work with us on the substantive amendments that we will submit on Committee Stage, aimed at strengthening this legislation considerably. I want to offer my solidarity to all of the families who have found themselves in the terrible position of having to engage with marine casualty investigations. As fisheries and marine spokesperson for Sinn Féin, I have a pa…

I will take this opportunity to bring to the Minister's attention a matter I regard as serious and which has been ongoing for a number of years. It is an issue that arose following the digitisation of land boundaries in Ireland by the PRA, formerly known as the Land Registry. It moved to the digitisation of land maps during my first term as a Deputy. Issues with one landowner were brought to my attention in 2015. There were clear anomalies between the Ordnance Survey maps that person had and the folio they owned, o…

They are not agreed. At the meeting of the Business Committee, a number of Opposition parties requested that the Minister for the Environment, Climate and Communications, Deputy Eamon Ryan, make a statement to the House on the absence of a transparent public appointments process for the members of the Climate Change Advisory Council. The Taoiseach utterly failed in his responsibility to deal with Fine Gael in the Katherine Zappone affair. Here we are again in that he is repeatedly refusing to demand that the Minist…

The process-----

There is no process. It does not matter about the process, then.

Entitled to-----

There was an error in respect of the speaking time in the previous Sinn Féín slot. There were two and a half minutes remaining, which should have been allocated to Deputy Martin Kenny. I ask that 12 and a half minutes be allocated to this slot to make up that difference, if the Leas-Cheann Comhairle is agreeable. It is the same amount of time overall. Is that fair enough?

Every Deputy will want to share with the Minister their experiences in their own constituency. My home county of Donegal has had major problems with ambulance services in recent years. There are a number of families who have lost loved ones due to the length of time it took the ambulance to arrive. There is no doubt about that. They have very courageously told their stories and campaigned for a better ambulance service. I am sorry to report, having spoken to people who work in the service over the past few days, th…

Not agreed. There is real concern about the manner in which the Minister for the Environment, Climate and Communications, Deputy Eamon Ryan, appointed two close colleagues to the Climate Change Advisory Council. There has clearly been no formal public appointments practice involved with those two appointments. We have been through the Katherine Zappone affair and the Oireachtas was scandalised by all of that for months.

We need the Taoiseach to tell us when the Minister, Deputy Eamon Ryan, will come before this Dáil and make a statement outlining the process that led to those two appointments. We need to know if he will come in at the earliest opportunity and if the Taoiseach will ask him to come in.

It only came to public attention over the weekend in newspaper reports.

I want to show the Minister of State a map which he may have seen before. It is a map the Northern and Western Regional Assembly published a number of years ago. If one looks at it the deficit in infrastructure in the north-west of Ireland, working its way down to the west, is very clear. Let us look at it. There is no motorway network to the fourth largest city on the island, Derry, and County Donegal. There are about 500,000 people in the cross-Border region of west County Tyrone, County Donegal and County Derry.…

The Taoiseach basically said in his reply that there is no specific committee meeting on marine and fishing. We are the only island state, which will hopefully be a nation in the near future, in Europe. There are two junior Ministers in the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, neither of whom deals specifically with fisheries and the marine. That indicates the level of commitment the Government has towards fishing communities. Deputy O'Sullivan represents a fishing community and he should know that the v…

Everything I said today was based on facts. They were absolutely 100% facts.

They are facts. He said I was sloganeering but they are facts.

I am going to reiterate some of the points I made to the Taoiseach earlier about the reality of what is happening around our coast today. I will put it back on the record. The Irish fishing fleet is allocated 15% of the quota in fish in our own waters under the Common Fisheries Policy. The other 85% is allocated to the fishing fleets of other EU member states. This is under the relative stability principle, a principle that dates back to the 1970s, when Ireland joined the EU as it is today. What does this mean? It …

I had the opportunity earlier today to raise again with the Taoiseach the crisis in our fishing industry. What has caused this? If we look at our waters under the jurisdiction of the Common Fisheries Policy, 15% of the fish quota in these waters has been allocated to the Irish fishing fleet every year for years. The other 85% is given to the fishing fleets of other European member states. This is based on what is called relative stability and based on the fishing practices of the 1970s. This has been allowed to hap…

Double the tax on second homes.