The Deputy is correct. It is difficult for me to give a comprehensive response within this timeline. I have been vocal on this matter and I have raised it directly with Israeli Government Ministers. The EU has also been quite vocal on this issue in terms of expressing concern. I have parliamentary questions on foreign affairs on Thursday next week and I would happily discuss it then. Perhaps that is the best way to get a more detailed answer.

That is a matter for the Business Committee.

The short answer is that there is a lot going on, involving the Taoiseach, the Tánaiste, myself and others. Obviously, we are working with EU counterparts and speaking directly to the Biden Administration. I got a chance to speak to one of President Biden's most senior advisers this week and to members of Congress, such as Congressman Brendan Boyle and others, at COP26. However, the main focus is to try to encourage progress in the discussions between Vice-President Maroš Šefčovič and Lord Frost. They are meeting d…

The Deputy kindly flagged that he was going to raise this issue. I am trying to get more detail about how best we can respond to it. Let us not forget that Childline is not a State agency. It is a service that gets some State funding, but it gets a lot of private funding as well. It is providing a very important service and we have to put some thought into how we can ensure that the service provided by Childline can also be provided for children who use Irish as their first and daily language. However, we must do t…

I will have to refer back to the Deputy with a date for the legislation. However, it is a clear commitment in the programme for Government on which we have to follow through.

On those two suggestions, there is a strong historical link between the Air Corps and Knock in terms of using the airport's facilities for refuelling and conducting operations in the west of Ireland. When the Air Corps was central to the search and rescue, SAR, operations off the west coast, Knock was used as a strategic location. However, since the Air Corps withdrew from SAR operations in 2004 that activity has effectively ceased. Casement Aerodrome in Baldonnel remains the main logistical airport for the Air Cor…

In the recent budget there was an emphasis on trying to recognise the fact that there is fuel cost inflation and increased costs for families and homes. Independent assessments of the budget have shown that the Government is successfully compensating for that. We will keep this under review as we go through the winter in terms of the energy issues we discussed earlier.

The staff complement will reach approximately 900 by February, which is an increase of about 450 from a month ago. I know that many Deputies are getting requests for help from families to get passports turned around quickly. There are all sorts of reasons for that, nearly all linked to the Covid pandemic. We are dramatically ramping up the human resources in the Passport Office. We have worked with the OPW to get a lot of extra space. In the next week or so we will put up Perspex units between staff and their colle…

This week in Glasgow we announced an additional €4.2 million for small island developing states in the Caribbean and Pacific. This will go to supports for catastrophe insurance and climate adaptation funds. We have given this significant commitment of more than doubling our climate finance as part of overseas development aid funding by 2025. We will go from spending €93 million on climate finance currently to €225 million. I insisted that that be new money so that we are not diverting money away from other essentia…

This is not the first time this issue has been raised and the Deputy is right to raise it. I will, of course, ask my colleague, the Minister for Health, to come back directly to him on the matter.

Local authorities should make funding available for the upgrading of their housing stock. That is part of the management of that housing stock. I am not quite sure what the Deputy is referring to and whether he wants grant aid available for the tenants or for the local authorities. If there is a proposal for increased support for the local authority concerned, its senior management should make that case to the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage.

The climate action plan is not basing the targets for agriculture on reducing herd size. We are asking farmers to work with us on many other actions and there will be schemes to support them in adapting to those new asks to keep them in business and profitable, but we are not looking to reduce the herd size as a target measure. In places like west Cork and elsewhere, there are challenges with the new nitrates action plan, which is currently under consultation, and the Minister is working closely on that.

It was actually a kitten rather than a puppy in order to get my four-year-old to present some flowers to His Holiness the Pope when he got off the plane. She got stage fright and I had to bribe her with a kitten. Approximately 40 animal shelters offered me kittens, one of which I took and is now called Spirit or the Holy Spirit in my house. I have considerable sympathy for this issue. Both dogs in my house are rescue dogs. One of them, which I got through the DSPCA, was taken from the boot of a car in Dublin Port b…

That question is worthy of a two-hour debate, to be honest.

We should have such a debate in this House. To respond quickly, the answer is "yes" but we must bring farmers with us on that journey. Anybody advocating to just leave farming alone and as it is, without changing anything, does not understand the kind of markets into which we sell our food around the world. The reason Ireland has a good reputation globally as a sustainable and high-quality, safe food producer is we try to see ahead in terms of what consumers will demand in future. Consumers are going to demand a fo…

I do not accept this was an act of cronyism at all. This was a decision to put very well qualified people into very important roles. I am not committing the Minister, Deputy Eamon Ryan, to anything. He is well able to speak for himself.

Am I up now?

I am sorry for jumping the gun a little bit. I spoke to Senator Higgins on similar issues to this following the Second Stage debate. At the outset it is important to clarify that the purpose of section 2 is to provide for the delegation of a level of operational control to the force commander of international UN forces. The legislation simply provides for the current de facto position. The Senator's amendment would neuter the effect of section 3 of the Defence (Amendment) Act 2006, which recognises that certain mis…

That is because we stopped sending ships because we do not have the capacity to send ships.

Ministerial discretion is not a bad thing. I regularly appear before this House and the Dáil to answer questions and to be held to account, and I am held to account in many ways. That is part of being a Minister, and sometimes ministerial discretion is a good thing in terms of having the flexibility to use judgement and to make an intervention quickly that could be life-saving. We did that recently, for example, with regard to Kabul Airport. I did not come to the Oireachtas for that but I was certainly answerable t…