It is to link the pay of people in here to average industrial earnings. That is our proposal, that is our policy and that is what we campaigned for. I agree with the Minister on higher paid civil servants. That would also nauseate people. Low and middle-income earners, the vast bulk of public servants, were savaged with FEMPI but those cuts did not mean the same for the super-well-paid civil servants at the very top of the Civil Service, and that nauseated people too. We have a policy for that and we have put it ac…

I have a little luck for a change.

The Fórsa trade union has launched a campaign to introduce a four-day week. It is something that people on the left, including trade unionists and socialists, have argued for a long time would be a good measure. It is even more appropriate now that we should consider introducing a four-day week given the pandemic and the vast numbers of people who have lost their jobs. I am keen to hear the Minister's response to the proposal.

I am unsure whether people remember this but when I was studying geography in school, amazingly, the geography book said that by the time we got to around now, the 2020s, the biggest problem society would have would be that because of technological advance, we would all be working a three-day week and we would be trying to figure out things to do in all our leisure time.

The suggestion was that technology would confer great benefits in respect of labour saving and increased productivity. We got all the increased productivity. However, instead of this improving the quality of life of workers, the opposite has happened. We even had, as part of the austerity programme, the infamous Lansdowne Road hours, adding hours rather than reducing them. I do not accept that we would see a fall-off in services. In fact, countries that have shorter working weeks have higher levels of productivity.…

We are only working three days in here.

Many public servants are earning less now than they were ten years ago during austerity. They have not had their pay restored and they are working longer hours. Let us think about our nurses. They are overrun and underpaid and there is pay apartheid. The same is true for our teachers, and there is pay apartheid even for the service officers and ushers here in the House, who are paid different rates depending on when they came into the place. I would not, therefore, laud the treatment of public servants. Some, perha…

The question would have been moved if I had mentioned everybody else.

To follow on from our earlier discussion, the way in which services can be maintained on a four-day week, whether in schools, local authorities, hospitals or anywhere else in the public service, while keeping those services, is by recruiting more people, such as more teachers, nurses, local authority workers or youth and community workers. I want to know that we are going to go in the direction of recruitment to provide high-quality public services, rather than the cuts and understaffing that plague our public serv…

When the Fine Gael-Labour Party Government came to power in 2011, it coined its infamous slogan that it would get more for less. As that Government swung the austerity axe, the result was not more for less but a hell of a lot less at every level in our public services, to the point that we have nearly 1 million people waiting for procedures in hospitals, the lowest rate of ICU beds anywhere in Europe in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic, the most overcrowded classrooms and waiting lists for housing maintenance, ada…

The facts on the ground speak for themselves. To allude to our earlier discussion, they suggest that there are too many chiefs and not enough Indians. Too much of the money is going to the chiefs and not enough is going to pay the people who deliver the front-line services. Our ICU situation, for example, is terrifying. It is not about beds because we have the beds and ventilators. We do not have the staff because we have not recruited them or created the posts. We are not creating the posts in nursing and we are n…

As I have repeatedly stated to the Minister and his predecessor in recent months, the clock is ticking on the dire situation faced by taxi drivers. They believe they have no choice but to organise another demonstration, to be held on 9 October, because of the failure of the Government to give commitments and assurances about supporting them through income subsidies, extending the ten-year replacement rule to 12 years, a moratorium on the issuing of licences, grants to cover ongoing costs, a buy-back scheme for thos…

In all that chatter, there was no clear commitment. The Government cut the pandemic unemployment payment, PUP, of many taxi drivers who now have even less work available to them because of the new restrictions and there is no income subsidy for those who are able to return to work. They are caught between a rock and a hard place. They are in a dire situation but there has been no commitment by the Government. Will it commit to not cutting their PUP if they must stay off work and that the payment will give them the …

It was not a good start for the Government to cut taxi drivers' PUP payments at the same time as it imposed restrictions that would even further reduce the amount of work available to the drivers. The Minister really needs to get a move on and give those assurances. The taxi drivers do not wish to hold another protest, but they believe they have no other choice because they are in desperate straits. On the ten-year replacement rule, that could be changed now. The drivers do not have the money to replace their vehic…

I cannot see into the mind of Boris Johnson, MP, and I am not sure I would want to, because I would say it is a pretty scary place but what we can say about him is that one of his biggest international backers is President Donald Trump, another man whose mind I would not like to see into, as it would be even scarier. As we speak, Donald Trump is willing to incite civil war in the United States if he does not win a general election. If Trump is the more extreme version of a certain type of political madness that is …

Workers in Debenhams in Blackrock, along with almost 1,000 other workers, were on the picket lines at 6 a.m. this morning. I joined them at approximately 7.30 a.m. They had to go through the immense frustration of watching strike breakers brought in by their former manager. To be honest, most of their disgust was directed at the former manager ushering in these strike breakers. Frankly, I do not think the strike breakers really understood what was going on. The workers were appealing to them not to do what they wer…

Will the Taoiseach meet the Blackrock workers?

I suspect the suggestion from the Minister with responsibility for climate action, communications networks and transport, Deputy Eamon Ryan, that taxi drivers should be removed from bus lanes was some sort of misguided notion about protecting the environment from CO2 emitting vehicles. I have already asked that that proposal be abandoned. I have a positive environmental, climate action proposal to put forward. If the Taoiseach and the Minister, Deputy Ryan, accepted that the ten-year rule for replacing vehicles sho…

Do not make them replace their cars next year with CO2 emitting cars then. Give them two years. It would be a win-win.

In the Taoiseach's engagements with representatives of the assembly he should consider engaging with our MLA, Gerry Carroll. People Before Profit in the North and South brings a unique perspective that goes back to Connolly and Wolfe Tone on the possibility of uniting Catholic, Protestant and dissenter in a project to fight for a different type of Ireland. If we look at the reckless behaviour of Boris Johnson and, for that matter, Arlene Foster, with the health and economic welfare of the North, there has never bee…