South Africa is asking for the waiver, not me.

South Africa is asking for the waiver. Will the Government give it to them?

Does the Taoiseach have a special adviser on disability matters, or have any of the Taoiseach's special advisers ever suggested he heeds the call of disability organisations and advocate groups for his Department to co-ordinate implementation of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, UNCRPD, and disability matters generally? There are people dealing with different aspects of disability across a whole series of departmental silos, and as a result we do not have a rights-based appro…

The mother says they will have to come back to review it.

It is not happening.

On repeated occasions I have raised with this Government and the one previous to this, the fury of parents, the school community and local residents at the decision of the Christian Brothers to sell off the school playing fields of Clonkeen College in Dún Laoghaire. The Government has failed to intervene and the Christian Brothers are continuing to push through with that decision to sell off to private property developers the school playing fields. In the past week the parents were absolutely shocked to get a lette…

Given the new public health measures and the injunction for people to reduce their social contacts, I have asked the Taoiseach on a number of occasions to resurrect supports for musicians, entertainers, taxi drivers and people in the night-time economy. On 2 November, the cross-party group on music and entertainment wrote to a number of Ministers asking that those sector-specific supports, particularly the part-time self-employed scheme, would form the basis of an income support whereby musicians, entertainers and …

First, I wish to welcome the fact that we are discussing the situation on Palestine the day after the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. I commend Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council, which voted to fly the Palestinian flag yesterday, following a motion proposed by Councillors Hugh Lewis and Melisa Halpin. I believe Galway City Council also flew the flag, as Dublin City Council has done before. That speaks to the enormous solidarity that exists in this country, historically, for the plig…

The Government is nominally committed to the implementation of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, UNCRPD. In that regard I raise the plight of Accessible Community Transport Southside, which is a door-to-door transport service in the south Dublin area catering for 1,620 registered travel members, most of whom are wheelchair users or have severe mobility issues. That organisation is threatened with closure. It will run out of funding in two months' time. It did not get funding …

Great. Happy days for a Thursday.

I will open with an appeal to the Minister, and I hope his answer will be "Yes". We had a deadline of 11 a.m. today to submit amendments, before the Bill had even passed Second Stage. We were able to table quite a few amendments, but this is not fair. I have raised this at the Business Committee. We need more time to put forward amendments following a debate. Having listened to the debate so far, at least two further amendments have occurred to us. We should have the right to submit them. It is not acceptable. Ther…

Okay, and I will get on to the Bill, but we have to learn the lessons from what we did wrong in order to get this Bill right. That is my point, because the Government is still trotting out that the problem, and the reason we do not have the housing we need to address the housing crisis and affordability, is all these terrible objectors. I am still hearing that, and it is just not true. The facts bear it out in respect of the SHDs because the developers got their own special process and the nasty objectors were push…

Absolutely. I knew the LDA would not deliver and now it is not delivering.

The Minister said they would be on site by the end of this year. They will not be on site.

I will tell the Minister what my answer is. The private developers that successive Governments have insisted must in some way be involved in this process could not bear it if there was a large amount of housing in my area built at affordable prices of, for example, €200,000 because it would be very hard for them to sell stuff up the road for €400,000 if that were happening on scale. It is obvious that is the case. The way to drive down property prices and the cost of rent is by the State doing it regardless of the …

-----statements showing that they will comply with specific local objectives, SLOs, in development plans. Is the Minister saying that is in the Bill?

Fair enough.

That is if we have a Committee Stage.

It must be a meaningful Committee Stage. The point made by Deputy Nash about dereliction is absolutely right in the current circumstances. We should use the opportunity to do something about dereliction. I was shocked by the findings of a new report about the level of dereliction in Dún Laoghaire. The amount of dereliction on the main street in Dún Laoghaire drives people insane. We were put out of the office I had on the main street in Dún Laoghaire on the basis that it was being sold to somebody else. It was very…

I said I would support that.