I thank the Minister for being here. I commend the Pregnancy Loss (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2025 and Senator Ryan and my colleagues in Sinn Féin who co-sponsored the Bill. It is very important and, as has been set out by colleagues, this is the least we can do in marking this loss. The most extraordinary thing we can do as human beings is bring life into the world. I have been privileged to sit with my colleagues on both sides of the House, as part of the Oireachtas joint initiative on pregnancy loss and loss…

I thank the Minister of State for attending this morning to hear this Commencement matter. A new professional doctorate in educational psychology will commence in September and the Government has very generously made available a bursary of €40,000 per student at taxpayers' expense. I do not know if it is generally understood in Cabinet that this course will only qualify its graduates to work with the National Educational Psychology Service, NEPS. It an excellent service. It is very well managed and has no wait list…

NEPS is a great service and it absolutely needs to recruit educational psychologists, but this method is tailoring a doctoral training course to be specific to the needs of NEPS to the exclusion of all the other areas where the need is more acute while children are going into psychological distress for want of a brief intervention. Some of those children go on to develop serious issues and problems that become life-altering and life-limiting. If we were to look at the area of most pressing need, the logical conclus…

I welcome the Minister. It is great to see her here in the context of this Bill not being opposed, for which we are very grateful. I commend my colleague Senator McDowell on his drafting of the legislation. I thank my colleagues in the Independent Group and others who cosponsored it. The Bill deals with an issue that is very personal to me because of my family circumstances. The Minister met my son earlier who has had spinal fusion surgery. He is an example of someone who had that surgery very late. It was quite co…

Well said.

I support Senator Ryan and the amendment she has brought forward. It is a reminder of how intimate gender-based violence is and how the family is often the locus of this type of gender-based violence in our society. We have a serious endemic and persistent problem with gender-based violence. This struck me as I listened to the Senator. I grew up in a matriarchal household with three sisters and my mum. My granny also lived with us. Now I am a proud father of a daughter. She is 21 and working in Corfu for the summer…

Hear, hear.

I thank cross-party colleagues for restoring this Bill to the Order Paper. In regard to what Senator Stephenson said, there is a fetishisation of violence against women in our public discourse. It is in popular culture, literature, film and in particular online. It is a very powerful recurring narrative and it is a construct of a patriarchal society. Senator Stephenson spoke to some of the statistics. It struck me just before we came up here that on average one woman is murdered on this island every month. That has…

I raise the appalling vista last week in Washington DC, where 34 disabled protestors were arrested by Capitol Hill police. Many of these wheelchair users were manhandled, handcuffed and zip tied as they protested against cuts proposed by Trump's Congress to the Medicaid programme, which would affect disabled American citizens. Disabled citizens being manhandled and having their hands tied in that way by Capitol police shows an extraordinary contempt for the most vulnerable in our society. Let there be no doubt that…

Apologies as I was at committee with Senator Kyne and unable to attend. I am just going through the Minister of State’s statement. Regarding the abuse that “RTÉ Investigates” uncovered, not everybody will agree with me on this but I believe that was a predictable and foreseeable set of circumstances given the model of nursing care provision and the model for care provision in general that we have in the Republic. Last night, when speaking on my Private Members’ Bill on personalised budgets, I spoke at length about …

I welcome our friends from Slovenia. I wish to speak about the issue of children in Gaza dying of thirst. This is an appalling apocalyptic notion to think that children are dying of thirst, when literally 2 km or 3 km away, there are supermarkets in Israel full of food, water and energy drinks. There is no absence of water for Gaza. There is no absence of food. What there is is a desire and a willingness on the part of Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israel Defense Forces to murder and carry out an act of genocide by wa…

It reflects the vulgarity.

I apologise. He said, "what the f--- they're doing", but it reflects the barbarity and the vulgarity of the polity in which we inhabit. My question for colleagues is this. When we go next year, as I presume many will, to the White House and when we apply for our visas to travel to the United States on political business, will our statements be audited and censored? Will I be banned from entering the United States for calling out the genocide and murder of children by forced starvation? We need to have a debate on t…

I thought we could quote people. I did not realise. My apologies.

I move: "That the Bill be now read a Second Time." I thank the Minister for coming to the House this evening, and for meeting me in the past weeks to discuss this piece of legislation. I appreciated that engagement. I will put a context for moving this personalised budgets Bill to debate stage. Ireland is, by all objective measurements, an ableist State. That is a shameful state of affairs, as we have seen recently in the presentation that Children's Health Ireland made to the health committee and in the "RTÉ Inves…

I thank the Minister of State for coming in. I have heard nothing this evening to persuade me that there is any reason for delaying this for 18 months. I say that also in the context of a pattern emerging on the part of the Government to put a timed amendment on all legislation proposed by Opposition Members. I thought that, as a Chamber, we had a collegiality here that set us apart from the polarity we see in other parliaments, including across the water in Westminster and in Washington, and the vulgarity and the …

I thank the Minister for coming in and presenting us with her observations on the Farrelly report. It is fair to say Grace has become a household name in Ireland and, sadly, for the reasons the Minister has referred to. Grace was failed. Everyone from the Taoiseach and Tánaiste to the various Ministers who have a footprint in this area have all expressed regret this has happened, apologised and indicated they do not want there to ever be a repeat of this case. I refer to a case which has been highlighted in the med…

Thank you.

I raise the issue that has come to light from an internal cable that was published by Reuters, which is the statement by Secretary of State Marco Rubio that the processing of all F, M and J visa applications should be halted. The US authorities say they want to introduce increased vetting of the social media profiles of, particularly, students applying for J1 visas. That has an immediate and pressing implication for our own students. Hundreds of thousands of Irish students have done a J1 visa. I did my own in 1985,…

I thank the Minister for coming to the House. I thank my colleagues for sharing time with me. I hear in the Minister's remarks the alarm bells we have heard so many times before about impending economic shocks. He referred to them as shocks that may become more frequent. I entered the workforce in 1987, almost 40 years ago, so I have lived through recession, boom, recession, catastrophic economic collapse and then boom and here we are, perhaps on the threshold of another period of economic instability. In the 1980s…