Because the affordable housing is benchmarked to the market.

A case I have raised with the Taoiseach and repeatedly with the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage, will come up again in the courts on Friday. It concerns Jacqueline and her husband. Her husband works for a semi-State company and they have two children, one of whom has special needs. Jacqueline and her husband will be going in front of a judge as their landlord is seeking an enforcement order to evict them from the home they have lived in all their lives. I have written to the Minister. He says he…

-----and the council said could not happen. Will the Taoiseach give me a letter to give to the judge on Friday saying the Government now has a solution where the house could be bought for cost rental?

Will the Taoiseach do that to prevent the family being made homeless?

Will the Taoiseach answer my question?

I have got nothing.

That is not true.

Currently, 13,000 Ukrainians who have come here seeking refuge are working and contributing to making Irish society a better place, which is what most immigrants want to do. There is a very significant obstacle for Ukrainians in particular in that many of them are single parents - women with children - and there is no childcare is available for them. We already have a problem here in this regard. What measures are being taken to expand childcare provision for people here who need it and also for refugees coming her…

I echo what Deputy O'Reilly said. Trans rights are human rights. Trans people have every bit as much a right to be recognised in every level of our education system as anybody else. I wish to ask the Taoiseach about the PhD workers and postgraduate workers who are planning a protest in the next week or two outside Leinster House. They point out that the highest stipend for PhD students is €18,500. For many, it is much less. Even the highest level equates to about €8.80 per hour, which is less than the minimum wage.…

The Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation, INMO, has sanctioned a campaign of industrial action due to the unsafe staffing levels we are facing in our hospitals, as it has been saying it would do for several years. The situation has been getting worse and worse. Patient safety is being put at risk. Staff morale is on the floor. This is all to do with the inability to recruit and retain nurses and other health workers. Much of that relates to our failure to provide affordable housing for nurses and other public sec…

The problem is that there is no sense from the Government about the emergency we are facing. The INMO does not take industrial action lightly. According to its statements, the reason nurses and midwives feel compelled to take industrial action is that 10,000 patients were left waiting on trolleys during the month of February. They make this absolutely clear. For example, the president of the INMO said: Safe staffing should not be a pipe dream for nurses. Patients should be made aware of the severity of the staffing…

What good is it if people cannot afford it?

At that price.

At that price.

This deserves a longer debate but let us at least start the debate. If labour, which is in short supply, is busy building a private development that will cost €3,000 in rent per month, it means the short-supply labour is not building the public and affordable housing. That is what it means in reality when we do not have enough construction workers. We are getting investor-led, profit-driven, unaffordable development that nurses and teachers - all the workers we need - cannot afford, not even the workers who build i…

The European Union has made it clear that in developing offshore renewable energy, one industry cannot replace another. I spoke to fishers on the east coast again today and I have raised this matter on several occasions here. They are saying that because the Government has let the developers decide about certain sites, most notably the Kish and Codling banks, their entire industry will be wiped out. This will happen because the developers have decided the location and there has been no proper consultation with the …

Not for this project.

That is rubbish.

That is just rubbish. It is called sustainable and democratic planning.

Deputy O'Donovan would know all about that.