Just to underline the point, in my area, a lot of mental health services are delivered by section 39 organisations. In others, they might be delivered by the HSE. We discussed earlier the difficulty of recruiting people to CAMHS teams and the CDNTs. One of the additional problems compounding that difficulty is that those section 39 workers are on lesser pay and conditions than they would be if they were doing exactly the same job in a different area working directly for the HSE. That is crazy. They are doing the sa…

I wish to share time with Deputies Paul Murphy and Mick Barry.

I thank the Labour Party for bringing forward this important motion. I truly commend Natasha O'Brien and Bláthnaid Raleigh for their incredible bravery in the face of the vicious assaults and traumatisation they have suffered. There are many things that one could say but in the very short time that is available to me, I will focus on the bravery and courage of Natasha and Bláthnaid in speaking out and urging our society to reject the sort of horror and violence they suffered. That is probably the most important act…

Israel would not be able to continue what the International Court of Justice has rightly recognised as a possible genocide, the worst possible crime anybody is capable of committing, without the favoured trade status, political support and arms it receives from the European Union. It simply would not be able to do it. The European Union is the biggest trading partner of Israel. Germany gives it the second largest amount of arms after the United States. Any change to that would massively impact on Israel's ability t…

Since Israel's genocidal massacre commenced in Gaza, hundreds of millions of people across the world have taken to the streets in solidarity with Palestinians, including in the US, where Jewish people have said Israel's crimes are not committed in their name and that Biden's arming and supporting of Israel does not represent them. Considering the depressing spectacle of Trump versus Biden – somebody complicit in genocide versus somebody who is a pathological liar, racist, abuser and proto-fascist – should we not st…

The issue of housing is not only responsible for untold hardship, anxiety and suffering for large numbers of people who are at the wrong end of the housing crisis, but it is also probably the greatest economic problem we now face, and increasingly so. We cannot recruit teachers because they cannot afford to live in places like Dublin. We cannot recruit enough health workers because they cannot afford to pay rents or hope to buy homes. Many of our young people coming out of university are leaving the country because…

There will not be if Israel keeps bombing the Palesinians.

It is an absolute disgrace that the Taoiseach signed an order to exclude the Aungier Street site from a requirement to deliver social and affordable housing, and that that site is going to be handed over to private interests when we urgently need social and affordable housing on public sites. It really underlines the criticism of the Housing Commission report regarding the need for a radical reset of housing policy and its references to the ineffective decision-making, reactive policy and the many other criticisms …

Will it happen?

No, it is not. It is up to the Government.

It is up to the Government.

I have been asking for weeks.

That is not a "Yes", then.

But it is in the your hands.

Not agreed; not unless we get commitment to a debate.

I raise with the Taoiseach an issue about which he has received correspondence from the alliance supporting nursing homes. The alliance wrote to the Taoiseach on 21 June 2024 regarding the national vetting service which, I believe, crosses Departments. I imagine that because it is dealt with under the National Vetting Bureau (Children and Vulnerable Persons) Act 2012, it has implications across Government with regard to the vetting of people who work with children and vulnerable persons. The issue raised by the all…

It is obvious that the Taoiseach is running away from a debate on the report by the Housing Commission, which we have been asking about for weeks. One of the major contributors to the report was the NESC. It gave a presentation to the commission in March 2023, which referred to the need to engineer permanent affordability into housing policy. NESC referred to the housing policy as dysfunctional and said that an emergency response was required. It also said that we needed the active managing of land for the public g…

Do we not question that?

Jesus.

I do.