One of the key pillars of climate action, which the Minister talks about but which I do not think he really understands, is the just transition for workers affected by it. Regarding the €15 million the Minister spoke of, let us consider those taxi drivers whose incomes have either been reduced to zero, for the 40% who have remained on the PUP because there is no work out there, or those others who have experienced a reduction of 60% to 70%. Those drivers still have to make their car repayments and to pay their insu…

I was just talking to one of the leaders of a taxi representative group just now. He spoke of a taxi driver who looked for a loan from the bank of €5,000 and was refused. Why was that? It was because when the banks look at the situation of the taxi industry as it is now, they know there is no work and no income. As a result, they think that those applying for even €5,000 loans must be joking and they are refusing to loan even those amounts. How then are the individual taxi drivers supposed to get €25,000, which is …

What about all the debts they have?

I do not need to remind the Tánaiste about the very significant hardship and sacrifice that huge numbers of people have undergone as a result of the Covid pandemic. With a motion that People Before Profit is putting before the House tonight, we are proposing that for many of those who have made that sacrifice and suffered that stress, anxiety and hardship, we need to offer them a better future as we move out of Covid, and in particular in the area of education and access to higher and further education and apprenti…

Once upon a time, it was considered unthinkable that there would be open access to secondary education. We now look back and see it as monstrous that we would ration or limit the number of places available in secondary education. It is just as irrational and, frankly, lacking in vision to believe that we should still ration or limit access to higher and further education, education which benefits both those who desire access to it and our society as a whole. It is not the case that we have done what we should do wi…

Our group is not speaking on this Bill.

I move: That Dáil Éireann: notes that: — Covid-19 and public health restrictions have imposed significant hardship and sacrifice on young people, students and all those in education, seriously diminishing the educational experience and negatively impacting on mental health and general wellbeing; — even before the Covid-19 pandemic, this cohort of people faced very significant stresses and hardships, including: — the serious stress and anxiety among students generated by the Leaving Certificate and intense competiti…

I am sharing with Deputies Paul Murphy and Gino Kenny. I am taking eight minutes, Deputy Paul Murphy is taking eight minutes and Deputy Gino Kenny is taking four minutes.

The socialists are extremely well organised. We are also trying to be ahead of the curve with this. It is sometimes frustrating in this place because there is great interest in the barneys and the Punch and Judy show. However, there is not so much interest when Deputies are trying to put forward what I would consider in this motion on higher and further education to be positive proposals for a radical overhaul of the way in which people can access higher and further education and apprenticeships. The proposals we a…

I thank everyone who contributed to this debate. Mostly, however, I thank young people and students for forcing these issues to the top of the agenda, especially during this period of Covid-19. I thank the leaving certificate students this year and last year who simply refused to do the leaving certificate examinations, despite the Government's obsession with trying to carry on with them. Those students insisted they were not going to be forced to do the leaving certificate examinations and they forced the Governme…

I am sharing time with Deputy Barry. I thank Deputy Funchion for introducing this important Bill, which I obviously fully support. It should be acted on immediately. I am very conscious of how important this Bill is, particularly because as an adoptee, I am lucky that I did not have to wade my way through all the barriers and difficulties that many adoptees have faced in trying to secure access to their history, identity and the basic facts of who they are. In my case, my mother actually came and found me although …

The Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, is looking for a waiver of pre-legislative scrutiny of the residential tenancies Bill, in which he intends to extend the enhanced Covid protections for tenants in arrears, but it is not clear whether it will keep those protections for other tenants where they face eviction on grounds of sale or refurbishment. I have cited on numerous occasions here the plight of tenants in Dún Laoghaire who have always paid their rent. A ruthless vultu…

Is it not pretty embarrassing that Boris Johnson's Government has managed to do a better job of rolling out the vaccination programme than our Government? This is the Prime Minister who made an absolute hames of the initial response to the pandemic and who, to put it mildly, has shown incompetence at many levels during this crisis. However, Boris Johnson's Government is streets ahead of us in terms of securing the vaccine and rolling it out. Does the Taoiseach have an explanation as to how we could get it so wrong …

It seems the European Union has performed extremely badly in securing the supplies of vaccine that we need and the contrast with Britain is stark. I wonder the extent to which this is because the European Union is deferring to the big pharmaceutical companies that are producing the vaccine because of their desire to make money and so on. I say that because, for example, the World Health Organization is calling for support for the People's Vaccine issue, which will be voted on at the World Trade Organization where E…

Could we get a brief answer on the Chinese and Russian vaccines?

The Sisters of Charity have been again implicated in really quite shameful practices, in terms of the revelations about illegal adoptions and their involvement in St. Patrick's Guild. The order has also been implicated in the mother and baby home scandal but, incredibly, this same religious order will be running the National Maternity Hospital, against a background where Archbishop Diarmuid Martin said last May that under no circumstances, regardless of the outcome of the transfer to the St. Vincent's Holdings grou…

I am sharing time with Deputy Barry. The Minister may not know it but he has People Before Profit to thank for the opportunity to debate this issue. We specifically requested it at the Business Committee. Such is our commitment to this matter, we have also tabled a motion that will give the Minister another opportunity to discuss it tomorrow. I will have more time to set out our stall in that debate. Covid has brought us to a moment when long-overdue, radical reform and overhaul of the further, higher and third lev…

Ten families and individuals, in the St. Helen's Court apartment complex in Dún Laoghaire, whose plight I have raised around 20 to 30 times in the past four years, received letters to tell them they will be evicted within ten days of the lifting of level 5 restrictions, or 56 days from the receipt of the letter. I want to stress the landlord in this case is a vulture fund. The residents have always paid their rent and they are model tenants. However, because of loopholes in the Residential Tenancies Act and the fac…

The Minister should stop trying to throw mud in people's eyes with his political attacks on the Opposition, which are designed to do nothing other than deflect from a deadly serious argument about an issue which is absolutely critical for vast numbers of people. Even if we set aside all that has been said about a return to Fianna Fáil's past with regard to developers and so on, at the most elementary level, the scheme the Minister has designed is thoroughly misguided. The problem is that house prices are completely…

The inescapable logic of what needs to be done in response to what I consider to be a pretty serious crisis in the banking and financial system is that we need to take it into public ownership. The Minister might say that my colleagues and I were always going to say that, but I think it sort of adds weight to a socialist case that has long been made, one which we strongly put forward in the aftermath of the financial crash of 2008, that very unlikely voices in this House who are part of one of the Government partie…