Absolutely, although the point is, as I mentioned earlier, that if people refuse to sign those buy-out contracts and do not get a job, they are in effect blacklisted. On the specific question, in order to avail of section 481, film producer companies have to sign a declaration that they are abiding by legislation such as the Protection of Employees (Fixed-Term Work) Act, and they are supposed to notify the Minister of cases. Did Metropolitan Films tell the Minister there was a finding against it by the Labour Court…

It is just pass the parcel. I have to hand an email from someone who was not even in front of our committee. Their name could not be given. It just said that they would love to chat about the film and TV industry again and that blacklisting, bullying and poor practices are alive and well and happening now in some of the 13 productions that were under way in the country at the time. The people who say things like that are afraid to speak out publicly. Those that did have not worked in the industry since. That is wha…

Of course it does. What else is it going to say? "We blacklist people every day"?

It is not private. It is public money.

The Government has not built a single house-----

-----four years later.

This is a priority question and the senior Minister is not here, which I find unacceptable. On Friday week I will accompany to the court Jackie and her husband - he has worked all his life for a State company and they have two kids - for a case involving an enforcement order, following which they will most likely be evicted from their home having done nothing wrong. Because they are slightly over the income threshold, they are not entitled to HAP or social housing and are expected to live in their car in a couple o…

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. This is the problem when the senior Minister is not here: we just get script. No disrespect to the Minister of State, Deputy Noonan, but that is the problem. None of what he said stops the cliff edge Jackie, her husband and their two kids face in being evicted next Friday from the home in which they have lived all their lives, and this during what is supposedly a moratorium on such evictions. That is what is happening in reality. What the Minister of State said does not stop the stress…

I know the Minister of State is not, but the Minister is. Jackie and her husband, who, I repeat, works for a State company, with their two kids have written to the Minister, to the Taoiseach and to everybody. They have written to Frank Curran, the head of Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council. They are over the income threshold, so none of the things the Minister of State said will help them. Jackie and her family cry themselves to sleep every night and they are going to be living in a car because they have nowhere…

As a member of the Business Committee, I requested this special debate on Coillte some weeks ago. Like many who were on the protest today and many of the thousands who have signed the "Save our Forest - Save our Lands" petition, I was absolutely horrified by the proposed deal between Coillte, a public forest company that is owned by the people, and a vulture fund. And Gresham House is, in my opinion, a vulture fund.

I will explain why it is a vulture fund. I will set the context for this. Our forests were destroyed by colonial and imperial plunder. It was brought down to about 1% in a country that used to have 80% forest of native woodland. One of the objectives and missions of the revolutionaries who fought for the independence of this State, right back to Parnell and the revolutionaries who fought in 1916, was to recover and regenerate our native forests and woodlands. Therefore, it is absolutely appalling that anybody in Co…

Deputy McNamara will read it from now on.

I thank the Rural Independent Group for tabling this important motion, which we are happy to support. Many of those who are speaking are from the west and the south, where coastal communities and people working in fishing are being severely impacted by rising energy costs, the cost-of-living crisis, the impact of Brexit and so on. However, it may surprise people to know, because it is not talked about as much, that on the east coast there are also many people whose livelihoods depend directly or indirectly on insho…

The Taoiseach said that the Cabinet committee was concerned with the well-being of children. I wonder has he considered two things in respect of our National Educational Psychological Service. The child and adolescent mental health services, CAMHS, suggests a damning situation in respect of the treatment of young people with mental health issues and so on. There is a big overlap between that issue and the need for proper psychological services in schools. Such services are already considerably under-resourced and u…

The Government should get rid of fees for educational psychologists.

In a fairly terrifying development, yesterday the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which was instigated by Albert Einstein and other atomic scientists in 1945, moved the doomsday clock to 90 seconds to midnight from previously being 100 seconds to midnight. The atomic scientists describe this as a metaphor for how close humanity is to self-annihilation. Previously, the nearest the clock had been to midnight was 17 minutes, which was at the end of the Cold War. It is now at 90 seconds. That organisation cites spec…

And if not, we will blow ourselves to hell.

One of the features of our shared island is the demoralisation of nurses, midwives and other healthcare workers both North and South. Tomorrow, there will be further strike action by nurses in the North over a pay cut, in real terms, that they are suffering, where there is extreme demoralisation among nurses and a severe crisis in being able to recruit and retain them because of massive understaffing and so on in hospitals in the North and elsewhere throughout the UK. Does that not sound familiar? Simultaneously, d…

One of the reasons the issue of a political donation to Deputy Donohoe is so damaging to politics is because it is distracting from issues that would otherwise be dominating the debate and discussion in this House this week. One of those is the utterly scandalous and unacceptable proposal by Coillte to partner with an UK equity fund to buy up thousands of hectares of land and forestry in this country where public money and a public company in which the Minister of Finance owns 99% of the shares will be subsidising …

Pretty much every farmers' organisation, every organisation that represents communities in rural Ireland and every environmental organisation I can think of are utterly opposed to this deal. They say, rightly, that it is likely to drive up the price of agricultural land, squeezing out farmers and making it more difficult for them to engage in sustainable afforestation. As I said, it will exacerbate an already utterly failed and dysfunctional model that has been pursued by Coillte, with the consequence that the vast…