The Taoiseach should watch "Mad Men".

I commend the peace and anti-war protestors who have challenged the shocking bias of the Government’s so-called forum on security matters, which is heavily stacked with people who are pro NATO and pro EU militarisation and has almost no voices of those who are concerned about and warning against the Government’s de facto pulling of Ireland closer to NATO, an alliance dominated by powers that have a bloody history of wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and many other places. Is it not a bit Orwellian for the Taoiseach …

The UK's record is not brilliant, is it?

The scandal of the secret payments to Ryan Tubridy in RTÉ has highlighted very serious questions about governance and oversight in public bodies in receipt of large amounts of public funding. Of course, it is gut wrenching for the ordinary workers in RTÉ, the ordinary journalists who do not benefit from these staggering salaries that a small few at the top got, or the additional secret payments, to see this scandal unfold when those workers were victims of pay freezes, pay cuts, zero-hour contracts, instances of bo…

It is not.

Every single household and family, especially families with children, who end up homeless and are evicted into homelessness through no fault of their own are being let down by the State. They are being very badly let down. They are being traumatised. I have heard the Taoiseach say most people get out of homelessness within a relatively short time, but that is not the experience I am seeing. I am seeing families and kids in homeless situations for years on end. They are often not even in their own locality. This mea…

Will we get a report before the summer recess or as part of the summer statement?

Earlier, the Taoiseach referred to what he described as our allies in NATO. He also mentioned Britain. Of course, we have close connections, huge numbers of English people are here, and they are our neighbours. However, I have to question this thinking because at the moment our so-called ally, as the Taoiseach described it, has introduced a law that is going to make it illegal for democratic councils in Britain to support the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign against Israel over its ongoing systematic viol…

An opinion poll over the past week or so showed that a majority of people wanted the hated USC, to be abolished, something that was promised by Fine Gael in 2016. When it was imposed during the economic crisis, it was supposed to be a temporary emergency austerity tax. It was cruelly and unfairly imposed on working people, costing them thousands of euro every year. Despite the emergency being over and record budget surpluses, however, workers are still being hit with USC. Will the Minister listen to public opinion …

The Minister is rewriting history in terms of the rationale for USC. It was not put forward on the basis of broadening tax bases or anything like that. It was put forward as an emergency tax in response to a crisis created by banks and developers and it was imposed on top of the income tax that workers paid. If you earn €45,000 per year, you pay €2,300 on top of your income tax. If you earn €70,000, you pay €4,300 on top of your income tax. Due to the cost-of-living crisis, workers have lost €2,000 to €4,000, depen…

We have always done that.

No, we did not. On USC?

We never voted for the Government's budgets for other reasons.

Not because of that.

It was because of all the other stuff in the Bills.

There is the unseemly spectacle of Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil scrambling over who will get the credit for the reduction in USC. We have been consistent in all of our budget submissions since the introduction of USC in arguing that it should be abolished and that, although USC was unfair, its abolition should be paid for. The Minister knows this, as he has seen our budget submissions as well as the questions we tabled recently arguing that USC's abolition should be paid for by having new bands of taxation in respect …

I do not.

We vote against the Government's finance Bill. That is a different thing.

We propose them in our budget submission every year. This is nonsense.

That was in our budget submission last year as well.