With the publication of the summer economic statement today, the debate on what will happen in the budget is going to crank up. I want the Taoiseach to think about the fact that the cost of disability report suggests that people with disabilities have additional costs of €7,000 to €9,000 per year, but the disability allowance is €220 per week. In other words, the vast majority of people with disabilities in this country not only do not get the sort of support they need to deal with the additional costs of disabilit…

I am slightly off topic here.

I will make a tangential connection. The group of people I am talking about here are not making a request for the use of the Government jet, but they deserve a bit of support from the State. I commend Jack Marley, who is the first Irish amateur boxer to qualify for the Olympic Games in the heavyweight division. He is from Monkstown Boxing Club in my local area. I also congratulate Seán Mari, who is from the same club. He did not qualify at the weekend but has a couple of other opportunities to do so. It is a tremen…

The victims of the secret payments and the organised cover-up and deception around those payments are the ordinary licence holders who can go to jail if they do not pay their TV licence and the nearly 1,800 workers in RTÉ who did not benefit from these staggering salaries, payments or slush funds but who often exist on low or very modest pay and endured pay cuts, pay freezes, bogus self-employment, abuse of fixed-term contracts and lack of resources and equipment to do their job. They deserve accountability and rad…

What about the independent film fund? Will we look at that?

It is RTÉ money.

It is not. It is RTÉ expenditure.

In my view, the stakes are very high in the RTÉ secret payments scandal, and the impact it has on public service broadcasting. I do not want to live in a world where the only sources of news and broadcasting are Elon Musk, Rupert Murdoch, Mark Zuckerberg and big for-profit corporations. At least public service broadcasting is supposed to be not-for-profit and serving the public interest and can be held accountable. This scandal has seriously jeopardised the credibility of public service broadcasting. I sat through …

Will you stop-----

I did not mention any names.

In my view, a plot was hatched to conceal these secret payments from the public, from the Oireachtas and from the workers of RTÉ, to launder that payment through Renault, and to mislabel that payment as a consultancy when it was clearly not a consultancy. It was a payment to an individual, which a group of people or individuals wished to conceal from the public. The public was always going to pay because, as we were told yesterday, Renault insisted it be cost-neutral. In other words, the public had to pay for it. W…

This suggests the Government and this House have to be responsible for a massive culture shift to end that sort of obnoxious inequality-----

-----and to restore the credibility of public service broadcasting.

I did not. The Ceann Comhairle clearly misheard me.

Can I have my time now?

Yesterday, we were told there was significant pushback from that individual on the 15% pay cut. That is what we were told in the committee. Okay? The problem is that there were also secret payments made, and they were - I do not think there is any other way to describe it - laundered through Renault and then mislabelled as consultancy fees when they clearly were not. If we take what we heard yesterday at face value, and I am not saying we should, by the way, we need to get to the bottom of that. Is that true? We ne…

In addition, there are issues relating to the copyright directive, and the Protection of Employees (Fixed-Term Work) Act is not being complied with. We need to address that culture.

The revelations about secret payments to Ryan Tubridy in RTÉ have been a kick in the teeth to public confidence in the State broadcaster and a kick in the teeth to the ordinary journalists and workers in RTÉ who have done nothing wrong and who, while these payments were being made, had to endure pay cuts, pay freezes, bogus self-employment, zero-hour contracts and many other sacrifices. They and the public deserve absolute, full transparency and all the facts to be put on the table with no drip-drip. The Minister n…

That is why we need to hear from the Minister.

They have no teeth.