Will the Minister help the people I mentioned?

At the outset, let me thank former judge, Mr. Justice Bernard Barton, for giving me a briefing on this issue some time ago and apologise to him - he is probably watching - that I have not been able to get back to him in the past two days. It has been a bit manic in advance of this debate. However, I am cognisant of his strong views on this Bill and I agree with them and with the concerns the Irish Council for Civil Liberties and others have raised about the Bill. I do not claim to be a legal expert but, in a way, t…

The efforts and programmes the Minister of State spoke about might make some difference. I wish that, instead of me, the parents and teachers of the children in question were here responding to what she said. They are the ones who know how the system is failing their children, despite all the efforts, promises and programmes from the Government. Like Deputy Gino Kenny said, the debates on this issue have been happening for as long as we have been in the Dáil. Every year, we find parents at their wits' end and unabl…

One hundred and ten thousand.

For the third time, I ask the Taoiseach - he gave me a commitment, but I have not heard back from him - about taxi drivers who have reached the ten-year deadline to replace their taxi. It is a very expensive business to replace a taxi. As I pointed out, people who were approaching that deadline during Covid-19 got an extension but only for certain years. Drivers of cars from 2015, 2016 and 2017 do not. As of January, we will have an anomaly. Unless those who lost income - that is the point; they lost income and emp…

-----and credit with the banks and so on. The Minister for Transport is not coming back; he is not being positive. Will the Taoiseach ask him to give the extension to those who lost income and employment during Covid?

The Central Bank has followed the Housing Commission in telling us that our housing needs are twice - maybe more than twice - what Housing for All projected them to be. That is how inadequate the Housing for All plan is. To meet these targets, we have to double housing output. In particular, we have to dramatically increase the social and affordable housing component of that because what the market is delivering is completely unaffordable for probably the majority of working people in this country. How on earth are…

In July, the HSE announced that there was a lifting of a recruitment embargo for the health services. That announcement was a deception. How do I know? It is because over the past number of weeks, I have had multiple calls from people at different grades and in departments in St. Michael's Hospital saying that a staff quota has been imposed. This means maternity and sick leave is not being covered, people who retire are not being replaced, department after department is understaffed and people are demoralised. All …

It is worse. The IMO says it is worse.

I say to the Taoiseach that there are no red lines for Israel. There is no atrocity it will not commit or horror it will not perpetrate. The latest one is by any definition an act of reckless, murderous state terrorism. This is the evil genius of getting thousands of pagers and putting explosives inside the pagers and then simultaneously detonating them all over Lebanon and parts of Syria. The mind boggles. To be honest, it is terrifying and this is after they have killed more than 40,000 in Gaza in the past few we…

The Apple ruling confirms Governments colluded systematically over more than a decade with the efforts of Apple to avoid tax and deprive the people of €14 billion when they were on their knees being crucified with austerity. It is worth remembering that in 2013, we were also starting the process of getting rid of the biggest property portfolio in the world via NAMA and selling it off at fire sale prices to vulture funds and international investors rather than using it for social and affordable housing. Had we not d…

As the Minister and Ministers of State know, People Before Profit tabled a Bill seeking to get rid of the sub-minimum wage which proceeded to Committee Stage. It is absolutely disgraceful discrimination against young workers to pay them less than the minimum wage, which is miserable in and of itself at €12.70. That is far below what a living wage should be. The ESRI, among others, has recommended the sub-minimum wage rates should go. Will that happen? Is the Government going to progress this or will it dance to the…

It is complicated if the Government wants to make it complicated, but it is simple if one opposes discrimination against young people. It is simply wrong that young people should be exploited because they are young, and paid less for doing the same job as somebody else who happens to be older. It is a simple principle and that discrimination should be removed. The real issue, which the Minister of State alluded to at the end of her remarks, is the pleading of some in certain areas of retail and hospitality who disp…

Workers who are not on the sub-minimum rates - older workers - lose out because employers depend on people who they are paying the lower rates. It is actually the older workers who lose out in some of those industries in terms of what they are paid because of disproportionate dependence on people who are on sub-minimum rates. I take the point that in many cases there is a very low proportion of people under those ages who are on the sub-minimum rates, but they are heavily concentrated in certain sectors. I do not b…

For somebody who is 18 or 19 to be doing the same job somebody who is 20, 21 or 22, working beside each other, is wrong. It is discrimination and it is exploitation.

For many years, I have been raising the concerns of people in the film industry and this question relates particularly to actors, writers, directors and performers who are forced by film producers in this country to sign buyout contracts, contracts which are far inferior to what actors, performers, writers and directors get in other jurisdictions. These buyout contracts are a breach, in the view of Equity, the performers and, in my view, of the copyright directive. What is the Government doing to progress the conce…

More transparency about how much money is generated out of the films is welcome-----

-----but the problem, as I have been trying to explain to the Government, as have the representatives of the writers, directors and performers, is the people with the whip hand are the producers. If you want a job, you sign the contract or otherwise, you do not get a job. That is the way it actually works. The contracts being offered to writers, directors, actors and performers are dramatically inferior than what you get in other jurisdictions. The terrible thing here is those film producers are only the producers …

I was the one who asked our committee to do that report. I know quite a lot about it, with respect.

I am pretty familiar with this issue because I have been bringing it up for about four years. The problem is, nothing ever really changes. I am interested to see this legislation and whether it will make any difference. Could the Minister of State please tell us when that legislation is actually coming up? To repeat, there is an easier way to do this and it is for the Government to crack the whip on the film producers because the Government gives the money. It is not specifically the Minister of State's Department,…