How many High Court judgments will it take before the Government accepts that wind noise is causing health implications? People and communities in Limerick are taking up their own alliances because of the health implications where wind turbines are put up. Wind turbine planning applications are being lodged at a massive rate. The wind turbines that have gone up to date never involved health organisations. The HSE was not involved in the planning applications of the ones that exist. They are ignoring the health impl…

I thank the Minister. Again, we are talking about health. The other side of things is that given the number of wind turbines that have been pushed through planning at the moment, it is not about wind energy. Cian Murtagh is a lecturer in Sligo and he has looked at Ireland’s energy mix. For the month of October, we paid €115 million in curtailment costs and over €300 million in the last three months, taking money from every household to give to people who are profiting from wind energy. This is a business case in te…

Offshore.

But we need offshore.

I raise UHL. We will start off on a positive note. The Minister opened the 96-bed unit in UHL on 13 October. We waited a year and a half for the HIQA report but we have it now. It states exactly what I and others have been saying here for years about UHL. It came out with an A, B and C plan. My view is we need A, B and to work for C. Option A would involve expanding the capacity at UHL. Option B envisages the ED staying on the existing site, along with the infrastructure for critical and complex surgical procedures…

That is right.

I thank the Tánaiste. It is unusual we are 100% agreed on both sides of the House that this needs to happen. This is a health emergency and under Covid guidelines we were led to do an awful lot of things under health emergencies. We had John Wall with us yesterday as a patient safety advocate. We have an emergency. Why can we not use emergency powers and legislate that this happen now? We have the commitment of the House that it needs to happen now. The people of the mid-west need this now. The biggest thing here i…

Nobody wants to see people with addiction punished while the dealers get rich. In Limerick, Sr. Consilio in Cuan Mhuire has done an amazing job trying to help people with addiction. The centre has opened a farm and a garden centre to reintroduce people into the workplace. She has done brilliant work. A former hurler from Limerick, Ciaran Carey, has counselling services doing the same, using people who have suffered from addictions themselves, because they know what they are talking about. We see people doing all th…

It is not and putting out such a statement about Limerick does not help.

Sorry, we are here to help people. Branding Limerick like that is not nice. We are here to help people all the time, and Deputy Sheehan should not say such things. The whole country has a drug problem. Naming one place by itself is not right.

I support the motion. The Minister spoke about the Act. The Act should be something the Government reflects on when it comes to presidential election campaigns. This motion is about having people on the island of Ireland be allowed to vote in presidential elections. I am old school. For me, there are 32 counties in Ireland, not 26. I will never change from that. Out of respect for everyone in this country, I will say that it is the island of Ireland. In the farcical run-up to this presidential election, parties in …

I have some great friends with me today. I have been involved in Greybridge classic club for the past 15 years. The youngest member, Louise Crowley, is in the Gallery and she is the Limerick IFA chairperson - the youngest chairperson in the organisation. She has been a member of the club since it started and is also its secretary. The Macra na Feirme president and the outgoing president, Elaine Houlihan, are here as well. These people have been working around the area raising money for charities and people in need.…

I will supply his tractor.

What about the presidency?

I thank the Taoiseach for his vague answer. The bottom line is the taxpayer will pay regardless. The vintage clubs are very important to me for one reason along with the men's sheds and women's sheds. The vintage clubs look after our ancestors and our past and use it for the present to raise funds. The Taoiseach is right. I did leave Fianna Fáil a good number of years ago and am now a member of Independent Ireland, a political party for the people of Ireland. It gives me a voice which I did not have within the Fian…

So the taxpayer-----

It is to do with charity and raising funding.

I acknowledge and welcome the 9% VAT rate for hospitality, hairdressers and all the others concerned. However, when other budgets are put in place, measures apply straight away. If the price of diesel is going up, that can be done tonight, but when it is a cut in the VAT rate, people have to wait to July. A lot of businesses will not be in business by July because they were banking on the VAT rate coming down to sustain the three wage increases that have been applied in the past two and a half years. It is hard eno…

Fianna Fáil was once known as the workers' party; Fine Gael was once known as the farmers' party. Both parties have turned their back on the hard-working people who supported them and put them back into this House. They put the two fingers up to them and told them, "We don't care." Constituents voted for those parties or voted for me and I work for all of them. I work for everyone. I do not differentiate between parties and non-parties. They are coming to me now - these are people in their 70s, grass roots of parti…

People may know me as passionate. I am actually speechless after seeing what the Government has brought into the budget, and I am not often speechless. I also feel empathy for the people who work in this country. I have had families on to me again today saying they were hoping they would have something in this budget that would help them to survive. Instead, the more they work - and they are taking on extra hours - the more tax they are now paying. One man told me he got a wage increase, as did his wife. Now, the t…