Dún Laoghaire Educate Together National School has a site but no building. The proposed Sallynoggin-Killiney Educate Together national school has no site and no building. Gaelscoil Laighean is still waiting on a permanent site. The Red Door School, a special school, has been operating in prefabs for over a decade. Gaelscoil Phádraig has spent 20 years in prefabs waiting for a site. Blackrock Educate Together Secondary School has a site but no building and is in temporary accommodation. That is just in my area.

Gaelscoil Phádraig has been waiting 20 years.

It is called advance planning.

The mother and baby home regime was organised abuse of mothers and children by the church and State. They have been cruelly let down time and again by the State. The commission report was an absolute travesty, as I said from the start, in that it failed to take on board in a serious way, and give way to, the voices of the survivors. However, the leak was a disgrace. Government spin came before the needs of the survivors and their right to see that report before journalists and everybody else. A year later is the Ta…

Global Ireland: Ireland's Global Footprint to 2025 puts much emphasis on our culture, arts and heritage but most of its initiatives are essentially about punting our reputation around the world. I am not saying there is anything wrong with them but we are not doing what we should be doing, which is to nurture and support those who produce the art, literature, music, film and so on. We have been talking about wage rates in this country. The two lowest earning sectors in our economy comprise retail workers and arts w…

I would like to see Government information flowing in respect of two areas with the sort of frequency and sophistication that we saw around Covid announcements. I note there is a Government of Ireland document entitled Be Winter Ready. We discussed at length the question of fuel energy price hikes. Notwithstanding the debate around all of that, there is a real danger of people on low incomes, such as pensioners, freezing during the winter and excess winter deaths. Many of those people do not know where they get hel…

We are supposed to be a neutral country but the way in which the Government is articulating its position on the dangerous brinkmanship and escalation by two major military political blocs - NATO and Russia - suggests that, for the Government at least, there is no question of being neutral or objective but that the Irish Government is taking sides.

Ironically, the Government suggests - obviously, the Taoiseach does not understand the position of socialists on this - that we are reluctant to criticise Russia.

The Minister of State really does not listen, does he? Let me put it as baldly as I can. Putin is a thug over an autocratic, nasty, militarist and imperial-looking regime.

If I may finish, to put to bed-----

I did not interrupt the Minister of State or the Taoiseach. I wish to put to bed the nonsense that Government Deputies come out with. I cannot put it more baldly. They would not put it as baldly as that.

We were out criticising what the Russians were doing in Kazakhstan last week, and there is not much action from the Government on that. I stood at many a protest over what the Russians did in Chechnya and the carnage they inflicted there and I did not see Members opposite there, so they should not try to confuse the issue. While I object absolutely to the Russians' massing troops on the Ukrainian border, to the whole nature of the Russian regime and, for that matter, to the carrying out of military exercises in the…

I have two questions. I have charged that the Government is betraying our tradition of neutrality. It did that with regard to Shannon and regarding numerous US military adventures. It is doing it again. It rightly criticises Russia for what it is doing off our coast with military exercises that are unwanted and should stop - Russia should be told we do not want them - and for Russia's often aggressive stance, military escalations and massing troops on the border, but has the Government any word of criticism about N…

In Ukraine it is highly divisive, and the Minister of State knows it.

The scandal that has been revealed in Kerry, involving overmedication, losing files and children and young people with mental health issues not being looked after properly, is not at all unique to Kerry. In 2018, psychiatrists in Wexford, including the consultant in CAMHS, resigned, saying the service was totally unsafe. Dr. Sharma said he was sidelined because he expressed concerns about the overmedication of children. I know of other people, and I will not mention their names, who were witch-hunted in CAMHS by th…

The €100 to offset the absolutely shocking increases in energy and fuel prices that people will be struck with over the coming weeks is pathetically inadequate. I am already getting reports of people getting energy bills that have increased by 125% in the bills that are going to drop in the next few weeks. The Government needs to do more than it is doing. We have repeatedly urged it to use its powers under the consumer Act to declare an emergency in energy prices, to control the unit prices of electricity and heati…

Will the Government take the sort of radical action that is necessary?

We will talk about that later.

We do not side with NATO on it.

I will mention the risk of people dying unnecessarily during the winter, as happened in this country even before the energy price hikes. Every winter, 1,500 to 2,000 people, most of whom are elderly and less well off, die as a result of the impact of winter, the cost of heating and so on. That situation will get exponentially worse in light of the current price hikes. I again ask whether the Taoiseach will use the powers available to him under the Consumer Protection Act 2007 to control the price of energy, includi…