You are some hypocrite.

You sat behind cars, did you not?

You did.

Deputy, it is the country's police force.

Your only solution is protesting.

I categorically state my full support for my friend and colleague the Minister, Deputy Helen McEntee, and for the Garda Commissioner. There are moments in politics when raw hypocrisy needs to be called out. The idea that Sinn Féin now presents itself as the defender of law and order and the Garda Síochána is difficult for this party to stomach. Sinn Féin is the only party in the House that has publicly supported murderers of members of An Garda Síochána. This is a party with a TD convicted by the Special Criminal C…

Sinn Féin knows all about terror.

The Deputy let us down.

I have only two minutes so I will briefly try to address a number of matters. Like everyone else, our thoughts are with a young five-year-old girl and her family. She remains in a critical but stable condition. She and others were the victims of a vicious assault last Thursday. I commend the members of the Garda who are standing on the streets across Dublin tonight. In many cases, they were heroic last Thursday evening when trying to protect our capital city and the people within it. I also commend the members of t…

Instead, we should be responding with firmness, unity and honesty in terms of what we need to do now to learn lessons from last Thursday evening.

It is a very fair question and I am glad to put on the record how this is developing. The right to request remote working has been integrated into the Work Life Balance and Miscellaneous Provisions Act 2023, which was led by the Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth, and was enacted on 4 April 2023. The provisions of the Act pertaining to the right to request remote working are contained in Part 3 of the Act and have not yet been commenced. All employees will have a right to request rem…

The important thing is that we get this right. This legislation was only enacted in April this year. It has not been going on for a very long time. The Deputy knows how the WRC works on something as complex as this, although it is not that complicated to be fair. It wants to build consensus between the two sides so that the code of practice is robust and makes a real difference to people's lives in terms of a request of an employer for remote working options. It wants to make sure that employers will respond as we …

I accept it is not new that employees ask for facilitation around work-life balance, remote working and flexible working. Covid accelerated an awful lot of this but it was happening even before Covid to a certain extent. What is new is the provision in law for an employee to request remote working options and for an employer to have a legal obligation to respond seriously to this. When you put something in legislation you want to make sure it works. Both contributors to this debate, ICTU and IBEC, if you want to re…

I will of course answer the question, but the written question seems to be different to this one. It is about the scheme to support businesses announced in budget 2024, which is about the cost of doing business. I will answer both.

There is no problem, whichever one you want me to answer first I will do.

I think you have questions down on both, in fairness.

It is because they are grouped that this anomaly arises. I will take the increased cost of doing business grant first, and we will deal with the flooding one separately. I propose to take Questions Nos. 2 and 3 together. The Government and I were conscious, in the negotiations for the budget, that many small businesses around the country are facing increased costs. Some of them are linked to correct Government policy, with regard to improving working conditions for people, increasing minimum wage, extending sick pa…

I will make a final point because there are two questions. Businesses will of course need to acknowledge the process in order to accept the payment from local authorities, but it is little more than that in terms of bureaucracy.

TBESS was a scheme run by Revenue. My Department was used as a vehicle in terms of an Estimate through which to run that scheme. However, it was effectively run by the Revenue Commissioners and I think was run reasonably. It was actually not that difficult to get into TBESS. Lots of businesses decided not to do it. Some businesses had hedged against significant increased costs. In the end, there were about 50,000 applications, representing more than 30,000 companies. We would have liked to have seen more applicatio…

-----that there will be virtually no application process at all and all these businesses will automatically qualify as long as they are trading.