As we face into Christmas, the chronic shortage of taxis will become even more of an issue and will deter people from going into central Dublin and other city centres. The National Transport Authority, NTA, has acknowledged there are now 3,000 taxi licences that are inactive. Taxi groups have been saying for some time - I reiterate their call - that drivers should be allowed to transfer licences to a nominated family member or somebody else. Many older taxi drivers have not wanted to return but currently they canno…

I ask the Taoiseach to respond to the question I asked, if he could.

There are 3,000 inactive licences. Let them transfer.

Are war crimes different if they take place in different countries? Is illegal occupation different if it takes place in different countries? Are systematic abuses of human rights different if they take place in different countries? Are crimes against humanity different if they take place in different countries? I would say most people would answer "No" to those questions. Abuses of human rights are abuses of human rights. Crimes against humanity are, as the words suggest, crimes against any of humanity. War crimes…

Saturday, 17 December is the day the new Taoiseach will be elected. The Cost of Living Coalition has called a demonstration outside the Dáil for that day. It is a very broad group of trade unions, students unions, disability groups, anti-poverty and housing groups and believes we do not need a new Taoiseach but a new Government. If there was not enough evidence of that need, we have had further evidence of it today with the Bank and Payments Federation Ireland, BPFI, report that shames this Government. It shows we …

It was zero. Does he know how many Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council built in the first six months of this year? Zero. Does he know how many South Dublin County Council built in the first six months of this year? Zero. Is the Minister serious in claiming his Government's plan is a success when it has failed to spend nearly €750 million against a housing crisis of this scale and when, in the epicentre of the housing crisis, the four Dublin local authorities built no new council houses?

Planning permissions are not the issue in the housing crisis. We have 80,000 planning permissions granted at the moment. The problem is that those in the private sector have no interest in solving this crisis. Why would it when it can command record house prices and record rents? It has a vested interest in not solving the crisis because if there was lots of cheap accommodation it could not make such big profits. The Minister claims, against that background where the State has to intervene, with catastrophic market…

Will it control rents and make them affordable? Will it deliver public housing via our local authorities whose job it is to do so?

For the first time in 15 years.

I have little to add to what Deputy Smith said on the substantive issue except to encourage those in the Construction Defects Alliance, the Apartment Owners' Network and all those campaigning on this issue to keep up their battle. It is because they have campaigned that they are forcing this discussion in this House and that they will force the Government to give them the 100% redress they want and deserve, and accountability for those profit-hungry cowboys who were let off the leash by successive Governments. The …

I welcome President von der Leyen to the Dáil and to Ireland. I appreciate her comments about Europe's commitment to ensuring that there will be no hard Border on the island of Ireland or that the exit of Britain from the EU should not in any way adversely impact on the peace on this island. To be honest, nobody out there in the world would thank me if we used this opportunity just to slap each other on the back. With that in mind, I am going to raise some issues in respect of which I think there is concern about a…

There are approximately 8,000 PhD researchers in the country. They do a vast amount of the teaching in our institutions of higher education. The great majority of them get stipends that mean they are in actuality earning less than the minimum wage. This is true even for those with the best stipends. That compares with the Nordic countries, where they get up to €50,000 as a starting point. Will the Minister agree, as part of the review, to meet the PhDs Collective Action Union and the Postgraduate Workers Alliance t…

I appreciate that. I think they would appreciate meeting the Minister. While the opportunity for them to make submissions is important, the end game is the critical thing here. The vast majority of people doing PhD research in this country are living in poverty. That seriously impacts on their ability to do their research or even continue as PhD researchers. We give more than €700 million in tax breaks, mostly to private companies, for research and development and yet in our universities and higher education instit…

It is welcome that we want to be best in class but let us be clear what the starting point is; we are worst in class.

The average PhD pay in Europe is €32,000. In the Nordic countries, it starts at €50,000 and progresses to €55,000 on a fixed-term, four-year contract. In the Netherlands, researchers get about 10% more. Indeed, a lot of our people who are doing postgraduate and research work are going to the Netherlands because everything, from housing to fees to the cost of living, is so much better in places like the Netherlands. That is bad news, not just for our PhD researchers but for the entire country. It is urgent that we l…

It is a stark and unacceptable fact that even if a student is in receipt of the maximum SUSI grant of €6,115, he or she will not be able to afford student accommodation at UCD, where even the cheapest and supposedly most affordable rates range from €6,900 a year up to €10,745. What will the Minister do to ensure there is affordable accommodation at publicly funded colleges and universities, and more generally, for the student population?

Government funding for student accommodation is welcome but the devil is in the detail. Will it be genuinely affordable? How much of this new accommodation will there be? It is only the accommodation built with the money the State will put in that will be supposedly affordable. The rest will be unaffordable. Is the Minister aware, for example, that, every year, UCD imposes the maximum legally allowed increase of 2%? Every year, it increases the rent on students despite the fact there is an affordability crisis. Doe…

On that point, we must do the catch-up and provide purpose-built, affordable, student accommodation on university lands. By the way, the idea of state aid rules kicking in is slightly worrying when it comes to public universities. These are public universities and public goods, but I will leave that aside. The vast majority of students are still prey to what is going on in the wider private rental market. Many of them are licensees living in digs and so on. One of the things UCD students' union again said this morn…

I welcome President von der Leyen to the Dáil and to Ireland. I appreciate her comments about Europe's commitment to ensuring that there will be no hard Border on the island of Ireland or that the exit of Britain from the EU should not in any way adversely impact on the peace on this island. To be honest, nobody out there in the world would thank me if we used this opportunity just to slap each other on the back. With that in mind, I am going to raise some issues in respect of which I think there is concern about a…

The only reason we need this legislation is because of the shameful fact that we have a two-tier health system. Consequently, huge numbers of people, nearly half the people in this country, are so frightened of what will happen to them when they get sick, given the state of the public health system, that they feel it necessary to pay out large sums of money every year in order to have insurance so they might access private healthcare in the event that they are sick. They do it out of fear. It is obviously not their…