Deputy Doherty took to social media yesterday. He will probably recognise the First Minister and leader of Sinn Féin in Northern Ireland, Michelle O'Neill, in the picture I am holding up.

Yesterday, on its social media account, Sinn Féin heralded the fact that it had managed to freeze fees at £4,855-----

-----and put this up on its social media as though it was good news. It is more than twice what students in this jurisdiction pay.

Sinn Féin are hypocrites and phoney. Your faux outrage, Angry Pearse, does not convince anybody.

We are reducing fees in this jurisdiction. Fees in the North are more than double, and Sinn Féin thought to take to social media to say this was great news. Sinn Féin are hypocrites. People see through it and that is why they are sitting over there, giving out, rather than actually being in government, because they have no credibility on this. They say one thing here and do the exact opposite in Northern Ireland. Shame.

I agree with the Deputy that we obviously need to get more gardaí on our streets. We need to recruit and train more gardaí. The Deputy has made some suggestions as to how he thinks that can be done and I will come back to that in a moment. I need to make a few points about the level of investment we are now making in the Garda budget to empower the Garda Commissioner and Garda authorities to increase the numbers. We have a Garda budget of €2.59 billion for next year. This will fund recruitment of up to 1,000 new ga…

I acknowledge the point the Deputy makes, and do not want to jump over it, that it is not now an issue of shortage of money. It used to be. It is an issue now where we are actually able to invest properly, but that also means that we need to look at the processes. If 11,000 people put up their hand and say they want to join An Garda Síochána, the Minister for justice and the Garda Commissioner are eager to make sure that the pipeline is as efficient as possible in taking expressions of interest to join An Garda Sío…

Disability issues and disability services are an absolute priority for this Government. That is why one of the things the Deputy will have seen published in the past number of months was the new national human rights strategy for disabled people, which is a really good piece of work. A huge amount of work was done with representative groups and with people with disabilities directly. It is a Government strategy that involves all parts of government. Because the Deputy has raised it, I will deal with it directly. He…

The Minister, Deputy Calleary, is eager to work collaboratively and is eager to engage with the Social Democrats and others on the composition of a cost-of-disability payment, what it looks like and who qualifies. He will engage with the Deputy and others on that. I have provided a status update in the sense that that work is under way with groups in the Department of Social Protection this week specifically on the issue of a cost-of-disability payment; I welcome that. I accept that it is something that has been di…

I do not remember the Deputy welcoming budgets where we brought in cost-of-living measures before the election. He is kind of opining wishing we had the budgets of the past number of years. I do not remember him ever supporting measures we brought into this House over the past several years to try and assist people at a time of extraordinarily high levels of inflation. The Deputy seeks to slag Paschal Donohoe, whose view I would take on the economy more seriously than his, for his views and call them nonsense. Ther…

Surely, the Deputy would acknowledge that, while we would like to see inflation fall further, that inflation both in Ireland and in the eurozone is at a much lower level than it was when those cost-of-living packages were brought in. The inflation was off the Richter scale for a period. It may be the Deputy's position, and in fairness to him I think it is as he is quite clear about it, that he wants to have two annual budgets effectively - a budget that runs from now to Christmas and then another budget that runs n…

-----but we need to build apartments. All of the decisions we take are to protect jobs because that is how we keep people in employment, and it is also how we run the country in terms of funding public services and we also make sure we can stimulate the building of houses and apartments in this country. These are good things to do. However, I want people with a disability to know, as I have directly said in reply to Deputy O'Callaghan, unlike Deputy Murphy's comment, that we have not abandoned anything. Work is und…

Except when you say it. When you say it you are such a wise sage.

No, the point I am making is very clear. The Deputy stands up and makes snide remarks about supporting multinationals or snide remarks about supporting developers.

I make the point that is about supporting jobs and building homes. That is the difference between the Deputy's ideology and ours. He is proud of that difference and I am proud of that as well. We have a different view in on this. The multinational jobs in this country are important. They help to actually fund through income and corporation taxes the running of this State and it is a bloody good thing we have them. We need to work to continue to make sure we attract investment in to this country, particularly at suc…

We are not planning on opening the budget process again because we are delivering one annual budget. Within the context of the budget we delivered, we have delivered a progressive budget. The budget documentation shows it is a progressive budget, helping those most in need over those who have the most. That is the budget we ran. That is the budgetary process and we will continue to run progressive budgets. In the context of that we have made a number of decisions to increase weekly supports to people with a disabil…

I thank Deputy Roche for raising the issue. I agree that we do not want people who are running a business to decide it makes economic sense to run it from their home. Last Friday, I was in Macroom where we saw the opposite. I met a woman called Nickie who owns a business called Juniper Lane, which makes homemade products, including jewellery and the like - very nice stuff. She had been doing that work from home and availed of a Government grant for a derelict property and converted an old derelict pub on the main s…

I thank Deputy Roche. I do not want to comment on a specific case for obvious reasons, including the fact that there are appeals mechanisms open and anybody can appeal a valuation to the Valuation Tribunal. The business to which the Deputy referred may or may not have done that. The level of increase to which the Deputy referred is not the general experience but is cause for concern. Perhaps we can have engagement with the Minister for local government and my Department on these issues in Galway. Now more than ever…

I thank Deputy Doherty. The position of the Government remains the same and as outlined in the programme for Government in terms of our concerns regarding the Mercosur deal. A lot of significant work is being undertaken, in particular by the Minister for agriculture and other Government colleagues, to engage with other like-minded countries or those which have similar concerns about the Mercosur deal to ascertain whether the blocking minority remains in place. The Government still has concerns about the Mercosur de…

I outlined that the Government-----