The Minister has all the pieces of the jigsaw there. There are the two airstrips, which are the big cost. There are the aeroplanes based in Na Minne. They are already there and are not fully utilised, so it is a marginal cost to use the pilots and the planes, which are not flying all day because of the constraints on the Aran service, to provide a number of services to Inishbofin. There is no major cost to this. Nobody has costed it in recent times but I had it costed as Minister, and it would not be significant, b…

The programme for legislation was published and lists 30 Bills to be published in this session. That is two a week. It is quite an ambitious target. On 20 July 2015, Review of the Nursing Homes Support Scheme, A Fair Deal, was published. Following that, it was agreed to draw up a Bill, the nursing home support scheme (amendment) Bill. That has been in gestation for five years. It has been promised that it will be published in this session. Can the Taoiseach indicate if that will be in the early or later part of thi…

Déanaim comhghairdeas leis an Aire. My question relates to the interim measures. It is clear there will not be a CAP for a number of years. This relates to the areas of natural constraint, ANC. Will it be the same ANC, will it be just a rollover or will there be change? It also relates to the basic payment scheme, BPS, the green, low-carbon agri-environment scheme, GLAS, and so forth. The Minister might outline what will happen over the next few years, because farmers need to know so they can get on with their busi…

When we had the rural environment protection schemes, REPS, 1, 2, 3 and 4 followed by the agri-environment options schemes, AEOS, 1, 2 and 3 and then GLAS, a farmer could pass seamlessly from one to another. This became a fundamental part of the income of many farmers. Suddenly, at the end of GLAS there is nothing. Will we get an interim environmental measure? Farmers cannot wait. They have to feed families and they have to live. Will there be an interim environmental measure while we are waiting for the 2022-27 pr…

My understanding is that some people have come out of GLAS and been left high and dry. These people have depended on it for years. I know that GLAS was much smaller than previous schemes such as REPS, which was the biggest scheme, and REPS 4 in particular. Certain farmers have gone from €11,000 or €12,000 down to nothing. They are still adhering to the same very high environmental standards but their income stream is gone. People have to live and survive. Many of them are on high nature value land, but that land ha…

I congratulate the Minister of State on her appointment. She will do a very good job. She is a very caring person.

We will start the clock again?

As I was saying, I wish the Minister of State all the best. She has a significant challenge. Over the years, it has always been more difficult for mental health services to get the money than it has been for some of the more high-profile acute services. We will give her every support we can in trying to get this money. As we are coming up to the budget, it is important that we are discussing this today. We could say much more, but we do not have the time. We should keep in mind that more than twice as many people c…

Déanaim comhghairdeas leis an Aire as a cheapachán. What is the Department's policy to ensure that all children nationally have a choice between Irish-language crèches, bilingual crèches and English-language crèches? We know that children absorb languages and the younger they are, the easier they find it to learn two languages or three if they are exposed to those languages. What is the Department's policy on this issue and on providing that basic service to our people?

I accept that there are a large number of naíonraí but a naíonra is a preschool whereas a naíolann is a crèche. There is a world of difference between the two. Getting to children at the crèche stage presents great advantages as against getting to them at the ECCE stage. For one, the service has them all day. There are naíolanna in the country operating through Irish. I am sure the Minister would agree that there is a privatisation drive in this country and an idea that everything should be market driven. The first…

The State has a constitutional duty to promote the Irish language, which is also its clear policy. When it comes to delivering, it always seems to be a case of listing what we are doing while not really doing anything. There are many Gaelscoileanna in this city. In many cases, and with great difficulty, the communities behind these Gaelscoileanna have provided naíonraí. One would have thought that the Department would have a positive policy to make sure that there was a naíolann or crèche connected with every Gaels…

Since moving to the west many years ago and finding out about the means testing system, I have always believed it to be penal. We often speak of how the tax system can act as a disincentive to workers saving but it also fair to admit that the social welfare system does that more. I will give one example. In the case of most working age means tested payments, with the exception of disability, which I will discuss when we reach Question No. 28, any savings over-----

-----€40,000 are considered as if they generated an income of 20% per annum.

If the Minister reads the question, she will see that it covers all means testing on social welfare schemes, community employment schemes and the rural social scheme. I presume she is aware that where a person on the jobseeker's allowance, for example, has income from self-employment other than farming, the Department means tests that self-employed income at 100%. In other words, if a person earns €30 a week from self-employment, he or she will lose €30 a week from the jobseeker's allowance. In the case of farmers,…

I thank the Minister for the very positive response. In the standard reply she provided, she implied that the rural social scheme is an activation scheme to help people get employment. That is certainly not the way the scheme was designed. It was designed as a supplementary income scheme in return for a substantial contribution to services in local parishes up and down the country by small farmers to supplement their income. It has been very successful in that regard. Until Joan Burton was appointed Minister for So…

We are back to my old hobby horse, that of means testing. There are people who are so disabled from birth or an early age that they will never be able to get employment or make social welfare contributions. The only social welfare payment open to them is the disability allowance. The way that income, capital and savings are assessed against these people is unfair. I would be interested to hear what the Minister intends to do to reform this system.

Let us go back to the cohort I spoke about, who are so disabled that this talk of getting employment just does not arise. I have come across cases where a parent dies and leaves, say, €100,000 to an adult child who has been disabled since birth. In that case the disability allowance payment dropped from €203 to €53 per week. If the parents leave €110,000 it reduces the payment to €13 a week. If parents die and a family home is sold, if they left €120,000, then the person with a disability would be entitled to no di…

I will give the Minister another example, a real-life case. A parent scrimped and saved throughout their life and wanted to make an extra provision for their disabled offspring. They bought a pension of €100 a week and gave it to the adult offspring. In this case, it reduced the disability allowance by €100 per week which meant the parent would end up saving the State money but doing nothing for their own child. When I and the Minister meet, maybe we could also discuss these cases. They are not hypothetical but rea…

The Supreme Court recently issued a decision on various issues with regard to the legality of the leave to apply for substitute consent process. Substitute consent allows applicants in exceptional circumstances to make a retrospective application for a project on which an environmental impact assessment should have been carried out before being undertaken but where that assessment was not carried out. The exceptional circumstances pertaining must be set out in a leave to apply application to An Bord Pleanála. The b…

I welcome this Bill but I have some deep reservations about it. They are quite technical and I hope the Minister can take them on board. There is a pattern in rural areas, particularly along the west coast, of tourism businesses opening from St. Patrick's Day, or around March or Easter, and closing around Hallowe'en or near Christmas. Many of them are not open in January and February every year. That is crucial because, as a consequence, they were not eligible under the TWSS. I welcome the effort to address this th…