I welcome this legislation and acknowledge the hard work of officials in the Department of Children, Disability and Equality. I know the Minister of State and the Minister, Deputy Foley, will recognise that work as well. Work on this Bill has been ongoing for some time. I was involved in some of the drafting work relating to the Bill when I was in the Department. I hope that it transits quickly through these Houses. We have to consistently ask ourselves if our child protection laws and practices are effective. We m…

I move: "That the Bill be now read a Second Time." I appreciate the Minister coming to the House to discuss the Bill. I am pleased to speak to my first Private Members' Bill. I note the Government has opted to delay the Bill using a timed amendment for 12 months. I am disappointed in that approach. I believe it would be better to allow the Bill to be debated in more in depth on Committee Stage. I will be the first to say that improvements can be made to the Bill, but Committee Stage would have been a good time to h…

The Minister of State has been thrown into the deep end here on drones but I thank him for his contribution. I appreciate the Minister, Deputy O'Brien, being here earlier on and making his own contribution, and hearing mine and those of some of the Deputies. I am grateful to Deputies, from Dublin West and other areas, for addressing this matter. I am not happy with the Minister, Deputy O'Brien's response and I will outline my concerns about it. The first of these is, just like with the framework policy on drones, t…

The Mayor of Budapest, my Green Party colleague Gergely Karácsony, is being prosecuted for holding a Pride parade in the city last June. As the Green Party spokesperson for foreign affairs, Councillor Janet Horner, has pointed out, Mayor Karácsony is facing a fine this time. Will he be facing jail the next time? In June, I and Irish MEPs joined the hundreds of thousands of Hungarians in standing against the efforts of Orbán's Government to stifle the freedom of speech that Pride represents. At what point does Orbán…

I am the first to say that reform of our international protection system is necessary, not simply because of the changes at EU level, but because there is international agreement and universal agreement that we need a system that is fit for purpose. I say that because I saw first hand the consequences of years of compounded bad policy decisions, along with a failure to recognise the nature of modern asylum and plan for a system that responds to the reality of asylum today. I want to make a genuine effort to be fair…

I thank Deputy Wall for bringing forward this motion which we in the Green Party are very happy to support. Fundamentally, the motion recognises that our economic health as a country is intrinsically linked to the well-being of workers, students and carers. Our economic health is linked to their ability to live, travel and pursue their lives in a way that is facilitated and supported by the choices that the State makes. Too often, people feel they face a battle just to get to and from work. They have longer and lon…

The title of this business, "International Developments: Statements", has the capacity to include many things. It could include the Irish Iranians whom I joined in demonstrating outside the Dáil earlier. They were protesting the bloody and brutal repression of protests on the part of the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran. It could include the Palestinian protestors on the other side of the road, who were highlighting the ongoing killing of civilians in Gaza and the West Bank despite the existence of a ceas…

Blanchardstown is about 14 km away from Dublin Airport and yet we have not had a direct bus route linking the two since 2010. We have heard a number of commitments that this route, the N8 under BusConnects, would be delivered. However, we are now told that the route has been pushed back until 2027. Is it because of a lack of funding that the N8 orbital route from Blanchardstown to Dublin Airport is not being delivered in 2026, as had been committed to?

I will give the Minister a bit of a history of the delays with the N8. I wrote to the NTA in August of 2024 and was told the N8 would be launched in 2025. In April 2025, when I enquired with the NTA about where it was at, I was told it would start in quarter 2 of 2026. In September of last year the Minister said in this Chamber that it could potentially be introduced "within the next year. To be clear, next year, that is, by the end of 2026". That is what the Minister said in September. I wrote to the NTA over Chri…

The Minister's answers are consistent but unfortunately they are not consistent with what the NTA told me last week. The Minister is saying the NTA service plan for the year is coming to him. That is great. Is the Minister going to go through that? Can he commit to us here that he is going to say to the NTA that 2027 is not acceptable and that he wants the N8 delivered in 2026? It is clearly flagging what is coming in on its service plan to the Minister. It is going say 2027, a further delay for Dublin 15 commuters…

What new bus routes will be provided under the Department's 2026 current expenditure allocation?

The Minister has set out the size and, in his own words, the unprecedented current expenditure allocation for 2026. I am concerned it only gives him enough to maintain existing levels of services. That seems to be backed up by what his officials said. The minutes of the management board meeting were quoted in the paper: "The allocation, while substantial, will not allow for new services to be delivered" in 2026. For example, on the BusConnects programme for Galway city, the NTA said in 2023 that Galway's new bus ne…

For my part, I will always fight for new bus services and public transport routes around the country. I brought in a question earlier specifically about the N8, a new service we have desperately needed for years and that has been pushed back. I am glad that the Minister is going to intervene, and we look forward to seeing that delivered this year. I think about the growth of housing around our city and brand new estates in areas like Tyrrelstown, Hollywoodrath and Kilmartin Grove. These are entirely new estates in …

Over Christmas, the Minister raised the white flag on our 2030 emissions targets four years ahead of schedule. One of the areas where Ireland continues to struggle is the emissions from our transport sector. The NDP sectoral plan the Minister published in November referenced the corrective action modelling project that the Department of Transport is leading to try to tackle the gap in our transport emissions. When does the Minister expect to publish that work?

The Minister's comments over Christmas cannot be taken in any way other than raising a white flag on this issue. What shocks me is that it is happening four years before the date for our 2030 targets. Notwithstanding our disagreement on that, will the Minister speak to a particular project taking place in his Department, the corrective action project, which is to address the emissions gap pre-2030 as well as post 2030? If the Government is to effectively try to bring us on track in the transport sector pre-2030, th…

The Green Party has called on the Minister and his Government to publish a plan B to show how, across all sectors of the economy, they will try to get us back on track to meet the emissions reduction targets. This project could serve as a model as to how that could be done across the economy. As regards one of the key consequences of the decision set out in the Department's sectoral plan for transport in November of last year, moving that 2:1 ratio of public transport to roads back to 1:1, I think we are already se…

I wish the Taoiseach a happy new year. On the 24th of this month we mark the one-year anniversary since Storm Éowyn, the strongest storm ever experienced here, hit Ireland. Over 800,000 homes were left without power and over 100,000 without water. This had an enormous impact on families, farms and businesses. Tens of thousands of homes waited over a week before basic services were restored to them. In the wake of the storm the Department of housing and ESB Networks set out separate assessments of the State’s prepar…

Absolutely, community supports are important and need to be improved but the Taoiseach has not addressed the issue of getting power back to people as quickly as possible and making sure we are resourced to do that. Last January, the strongest critique of Government's failure after Storm Éowyn was not getting power back to people quickly enough. In Mayo, 43,000 people lost power at the height of the storm; seven days later, 17,500 were still without power. In Galway, it was even worse: 59,000 people lost power on th…

Not quickly enough.

Thirty-one thousand.