Over the weekend, President Higgins rang the alarm bells about the dangerous drift in Ireland's foreign policy away from neutrality and raised concerns about the composition of the Government's consultative forum. The President has to be somewhat constrained and diplomatic in what he says. However, what he said echoes what we have been trying to say for the past number of months, namely, that the Government has seized on the tragic, brutal, unjustifiable war of Putin in Ukraine to try to move Ireland away from neut…

Any fair-minded person who looks at this will see it is dripping and stacked to the rafters with pro-NATO people and people associated with the military-industrial complex. For example, there is not a single speaker from the Non-Aligned Movement. For people's information, that is the biggest movement of states in the world that do not associate or identify with the big military powers, whether Russia, NATO or China. It has 120 members but not a single representative on the forum. NATO has 33 members and the forum i…

On Monday, a young woman with her two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, both of whom are homeless, came into me and said they had nowhere to go. I got into the Dublin Region Homeless Executive and in fairness, it responded quickly and they got a placement. Then I got a text from the young woman saying the place was not the best and was absolutely manky. It stated the cooker was in reach of the baby and she was told yesterday that a little boy had already burned himself on it. It stated there is nowhere to do her washin…

There are many disturbing and unacceptable aspects to the homelessness crisis but undoubtedly one of the worst of them is the number of children living in homeless situations. It is difficult to overstate how much the State is letting down children who have to endure emergency accommodation and homelessness, particularly for long periods. I have raised multiple times in here the case of a young woman with her son who has been in homeless accommodation for four years. Nobody should be in homeless accommodation and i…

There is a huge irony in people who oppose a two-state solution in Ireland supporting it in Palestine. Nobody believes partition is an acceptable solution here, yet somehow we think the ethnic and racist partition of Palestine is a solution. Nobody in Palestine believes that any more. They increasingly recognise that the Oslo Accords were a smokescreen through which Israel would continue the ethnic cleansing and annexation of Palestinian territory. Now, even the UN Human Rights Committee, which I believe the Tánais…

I would like the Taoiseach to comment on the imprisonment of Mr. Rached Ghannouchi. He is the elected Speaker of the Tunisian Parliament. I met his son at a Palestinian solidarity conference in Oslo a few weeks ago. He is very worried about his father because he is 81 years old. Mr. Ghannouchi is a renowned human rights activist and writer and was a central figure in the Arab Spring. Along with all opposition parliamentarians, trade unionists, etc., he was locked up by the Tunisian dictatorship. I was told that, es…

We were just attacking her bias.

It is not.

That is a shocking statement.

It is a shocking statement.

I was a disgraceful comment.

That was a shocking comment regarding the jackboot.

So do we.

It was disgraceful that it was said we were Putin's puppets.

No, we did not.

We are not on that. It is convenient for you.

I add my condolences to those offered to the family of Christy Dignam, as Deputy Smith did. Christy was a legend in music and a beautiful singer. He was a working-class hero and I suspect his songs will be sung for a long time, if not forever. He will be greatly missed but his legacy will live on. It would probably surprise many people that we have a situation where there is such a thing as a sub-minimum wage. The fact is the minimum wage, which is now €11.30, is not a liveable income, even for those who get it, wh…

Thank God for that.

It is interesting that the Taoiseach was talking about the difficulty of the leaving certificate mathematics exam when it is clear there are problems understanding mathematics in the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage. The competitiveness challenge report highlighted the vital need to address the high cost of housing and one of the centrepieces of the Government's response to that issue is cost rental. I draw the Taoiseach's attention to the fact it is not possible for large numbers of people on m…

The Taoiseach painted a rather rosy picture of the Government's progress in addressing the problems of the health service. A very different picture was presented by the Irish Hospital Consultants Association on Friday in a press statement it put out, detailing that 893,000 people are now on some form of National Treatment Purchase Fund waiting list, that a further 250,000 people are waiting for diagnostic scans and that hospital cancellations could exceed 250,000 a year if the rate continues, with 85,000 operations…