For the record, it is People Before Profit-Solidarity by the way. I have just come from the Committee on Budgetary Oversight, which was an unfortunate clash so I missed the Minister's introduction. I heard some but not all of it and I apologise for that. At the meeting, Professor Niamh Maloney discussed the consultation process the Commission on Taxation and Welfare will have. It was an interesting contrast in that the group is trying to step back from the taxation system and obtain a strategic view of what we are …

The Central Bank reports do not lie. This is from the Central Bank quarterly report at the beginning of this year so Deputy Durkan can say what he likes.

It is true.

Here is a more down-to-earth example. What does the Finance Bill not do? It does not get rid of the special assignee relief programme, SARP. There are still not enough people who know about this. It is really a shocker. I genuinely thank the Minister for giving me the figures and details on it. He sent a paper out on it recently. I do not know what the figure was last year, but the year before that the cost of the special assignee relief programme, a tax relief only available to people who earn more than €70,000 a …

There is too much wastewater going into Dublin Bay.

I will tell the Minister on Committee Stage.

It is just under a year since People Before Profit brought the first motion to this Dáil calling for student nurses and student midwives to be paid while they are working on placement. Today, they are still out there protesting and demanding they be paid and respected for the work they do during placement. I understand the Tánaiste said earlier there will be a slight increase for final year students and a continuation, just for the period of the pandemic, of the pretty miserable and insulting €100 per week. Does th…

We are 18 months into the pandemic and it is just under a year since People Before Profit brought the first motion to the Dáil calling for payments to student nurses and midwives because of the incredible work they have done on placement during Covid-19 especially but which they do all the time. The Government must get this. This is not just about what student nurses and midwives do on placement during the pandemic, although the pandemic highlighted the extent to which they work and help knit together our chronical…

He did notify. I am standing in for him.

What is being checked?

And?

There was a notification.

There has been a lot of talk from this Government about rewarding workers and providing them with a better deal after all they did for us during Covid. There are many complexities to that and we expect announcements and so on. One issue the Government could resolve is to give workers the right to be trade unionists and represent other workers in their jobs without suffering victimisation. In that regard, I raise the case of a shop steward working on a site on Cork Street where public housing is being built and on w…

I will send the Minister the details.

On the face of it this seems like a reasonable Bill. I am sure that it is well intentioned and maybe it is the right thing to do. If I understand it correctly, it is to give the Department of Education some input and oversight with regard to the work of Tusla and educational welfare. That is pretty much it. With things having been transferred one way, and then transferred back another way, one would be forgiven for thinking it is a bit of pass the parcel and a moving around of deckchairs on the Titanic kind of thin…

Our ability to reopen society to cope with Covid-19 and non-Covid-19 healthcare is critically dependent on our intensive care unit capacity which, before Covid-19 and still, remains chronically under-resourced, understaffed, and about half of the capacity of the EU average per 100,000 population. I had an eye-opener in respect of the failure of the Government to address this problem when an ICU nurse came into my clinic this week. She has been offered a job in a Dublin hospital as an ICU nurse, but she is on a stam…

There is a two-month waiting list.

The strategic housing development, SHD, planning process, which allows developers and property speculators to get around the normal planning process and increase the value of sites that they purchase, has been thoroughly discredited. It was supposedly brought in to accelerate the delivery of the housing that we need to address the housing crisis but, as we know, only one third of strategic housing developments have actually been commenced and we now have the phenomenon of these places that get strategic housing dev…

Why not scrap the SHD now?

He has extended it.