They will not be published until after this Bill has been passed. That is good.

Maybe the Minister can respond when he is summing up because I have been waiting for my time for a while. The RTB reported that it was informed of 374 eviction notices to tenants between March and the end of June this year, when the blanket eviction ban was in place. The RTB also said there was an increase in complaints about illegal evictions during September. Like everything, what good is legislation if it is not enforced and if people are still being put out on the street? Section 2 provides for the emergency pe…

Deputy Joan Collins was unfortunately unable to attend tonight’s debate so I will be taking the five minutes of her time. All of us have received an astounding amount of correspondence on this legislation in recent weeks. I tell the thousands of people who contacted me, and indeed those who are watching closely for the outcome of this debate, that I hear them, I am listening and I respect the agency of every survivor and their right to access their own data, to share their story publicly, anonymously or otherwise, …

Over the past week or so, there has been quite a volume of calls to my office from rural bus operators in County Donegal. They are querying what they see as the overly stringent nature of the qualifying criteria for the coach tourism business continuity scheme operated by Fáilte Ireland. Specifically, they feel aggrieved where, as stated in the guidelines, qualifying vehicles under this scheme must meet all of the following criteria: they must have been actively used by the applicant as of 30 March 2020 primarily f…

That is fair enough about the launch of the scheme. The Minister outlined that she is providing additional money and so on but the reality is that in rural areas, coach operators operate a number of different varieties of transport, including school transport and so on. They supplement their income by doing different things. I know from contacts I have received that the tours they provide for do not stipulate that the coaches have to be less than five years old. They stipulate that they must be mechanically sound, …

I agree with previous speakers. It is clear that not enough time has been allocated to the debate on the Bill. The legislation has been described as an emergency but the report was imminent when the Minister briefed Opposition Deputies a couple of months ago. We are now approaching the final days. The Minister is introducing an amendment to change the date to January 2021. A simple Bill of one line could change the date to January. That would be sufficient to facilitate a proper debate and discussion on what is inv…

For the information of the Taoiseach, the Minister put forward an amendment to the Bill that will delay the need to do this until January of next year. All we need is a one-line Bill to delay everything until January and allow us to have a proper debate.

We are.

That is right. I welcome the opportunity to speak on this Bill and commend Deputy Ó Broin for bringing it forward. In July 2019, then Minister for Housing, Planning and Local Government, Deputy Eoghan Murphy, tried to tell the Irish public that co-living was like living in a "very trendy kind of boutique hotel-type place". The Irish Examiner of Saturday, 20 July 2019, reported that one Opposition Deputy's response was that: They should scrap co-living. If Leo Varadkar and Eoghan Murphy want this bonkers policy so m…

The budget 2021 announcement of an additional €50 million fund for college students was one of the few welcome announcements on what was an underwhelming budget day last week. In his official press release, the Minister stated that detailed work would be undertaken on how this once-off fund will operate for a submission to Government prior to its commencement. It has been reported that the fund will equate to around €250 per student. For those who have paid a €3,000 registration fee and those in receipt of the SUSI…

I thank the Minister for that important clarification. According to the figures from the HEA for 2017 and 2018, only 130 students from the Six Counties are studying in the South, which seems to be an appallingly low figure. Is that something the Minister would examine? Perhaps he can check whether that is an accurate figure. To my mind, it seems very low. We should encourage more students to move in this direction. The fact that there will be financial supports for them is vitally important. How does the Minister i…

That is something that would be worthwhile. On the Connacht-Ulster alliance, there is a campus in Killybegs in the tourism college which also needs to be protected into the future. Strangely, Letterkenny, has been the biggest threat to it. We need to look at why it is cheaper for many students in Donegal to go to college in Belfast, because rents are so much lower there. Even with the student fees that one has to pay up there, it is far cheaper for them to be in college there. Perhaps that is also a reason students…

My initial disappointment in budget 2021 has not lifted. Instead, it has deepened as I have reviewed the relevant documentation and commentaries about the Groundhog Day feel to some of the Government's announcements. It is disingenuous for Ministers to stand up in front of us, the media and the public and make statements about investment, improvements and measures that have been previously announced. It is disingenuous to deliver the news in such a way as to make it seem like there will be significant additional nu…

Budget 2021 has been developed and delivered under the threat of a no-deal Brexit as well as the added risk of Covid-19 and its impacts on our health, livelihoods and economy, not to mention the climate emergency we are facing. None of us could have predicted that we would be in the midst of a global pandemic and that we would have a Government in which the Tánaiste still thinks he is Taoiseach and which has more leaks than a bottomless bucket. However, here we are, underwhelmed on budget day yet again. We are faci…

Tá brón orm nach bhfuil mé ábalta an Ghaeilge a labhairt i rith an contribution seo. I welcome the opportunity to contribute to this debate. We have waited far too long for these proposals to come to the House. The Bill amends the 2003 Act, which has not been fit for purpose for a long time, and attempts to ensure that the Irish-speaking population can engage with the State through Irish. It is useful to consider how we got here. In 2011, the programme for Government set out the intention of the then Government to …

I thank the Minister for being here. I wanted to raise two separate issues. The first relates to the events on Sunday. Second, I want to ask about the ongoing Covid issues. First, in the Minister's statement here outlining his discussions with the Chief Medical Officer on Sunday morning, he stated: "We discussed the current situation and the possibility of moving to level 4." Looking at some of the stories that were released about the matter, the Irish Examiner published an article at 5.10 p.m. stating that the cou…

According to The Irish Examiner it was 5.10 p.m.

I know the decision was difficult to make. I agree that people leak but only some people leak, not everybody does. That is important in this. It has become very important where the story leaked from and how it was leaked because of the reaction of the Minister's colleagues and what they have said publicly about it. It was not my intention coming into the House this evening to discuss that but when I saw what was being said, I wanted to raise it. The leak came between 12 noon and 5 p.m. on Sunday so it is important …

I am not asking the Ceann Comhairle to defend him. Do not worry about that.

The Minister has said that he discussed what had happened with the Taoiseach.