Since the Minister came to office in January 2025, we have had a 17% overall increase in homelessness, including a 26.66% increase in the number of children homeless. I will ask the Minister specifically about the measures he will take this winter to reverse rising homelessness. When will the promised and repeatedly delayed child and family homelessness action plan be published? What are the accelerated emergency measures he will take to increase and accelerate exits from emergency accommodation this winter?

There is nothing in the briefing the Minister's Department gave him and which he read out - it is essentially the same as the one read out to my colleagues who asked similar questions earlier - that addresses the crux of my question because the child and family homelessness plan has been delayed repeatedly. It was supposed to come in quarter 2, then in June and then in September. The budget is next week. When exactly will the plan be published? Is there going to be ringfenced, dedicated funding in the budget specif…

The issue I have is that we are functionally out of capacity. We are running out of emergency accommodation coming into this winter and there is a real concern that the incoming demand will exhaust all the remaining beds. There is nothing in what the Minister said, albeit his acknowledgement that the plan does need to be funded but it needs to be funded properly and it is going to need a significant envelope. Something around 20% of all section 10 funding needs to go into a homelessness prevention framework. The st…

The Bill is very technical and I welcome the Minister's clarification that Parts 9 and 10 do not apply to private heritage railways. That is very important. There are a few of them around the country. It is important that onerous regulation is not placed on them. In many cases they are privately run and located on private ground. They are mainly volunteer driven and do an awful lot of fundraising to keep themselves going, and I am glad the Minister has clarified that they will be exempted from this. I also welcome …

I am here to speak in support of this Bill. At the outset in his speech, the Minister mentioned Spain and the housing crisis that is raging across Spain at the moment. It is important to note for context that there is such a terrible housing crisis in Spain because when Spain transitioned from Francoism to democracy, the social housing stock in Spain was between 1% and about 3%. There was a Francoist system of housing which transitioned into democracy. There were the 1990s and 2000s, an awful lot of property specul…

The ESB made €377 million in the first half of 2026 while the Irish households that we all represent had to choose between heating and eating. This is a 20% increase in the past year. To be honest, it is completely abnormal and unacceptable. If the European Commission is not going to act on this then we, as a body politic, need to act here in Ireland. We need to tax these profits and redirect them to struggling households through targeted energy credits, a fund to help people who are in arrears and expanding retrof…

As the debate on the three-day wait continues at the health committee, women still face barriers to accessing abortion care. The HSE clinical director said there was no medical evidence behind retaining this provision and the Government must act urgently to remove the three-day wait. More significantly, it has been a number of years since the then Government commissioned the independent O'Shea review into how our abortion legislation works. That review contains several recommendations, including decriminalisation o…

What the Minister is proposing in relation to these citizenship changes is nothing more than performative cruelty. There is no evidence for this because if the evidence existed, then the Minister would publish it. He has not done so and he will not do so. The people we are talking about are, in the main, highly skilled. Many of them are doctors, other healthcare workers, engineers and so on and the Government is going to leave many of them in a grey area, in immigration uncertainty, for longer than they need to be.…

To be honest, this makes absolutely no sense. It is a political choice and a very bad one. It is a bad choice also from a climate change point of view. I was listening to the former Minister for Transport, Eamon Ryan, on "Drive Time" the other day and I have to say, I could not have agreed more with him. It is a real pity that somebody like him is not in government at the moment. We spent €1 billion effectively chasing the price of a barrel of Brent crude oil in terms of fuel subsidies, something that is not even r…

I thank the Minister of State, Deputy Ardagh, for coming here this morning. It is good to have someone from the actual Department. This feels to me a bit like Groundhog Day because it is my fourth time raising this issue. It is my second Topical Issue Debate, and I am effectively going to say the same thing I said ten months ago, so I sincerely hope that the Minister of State's Department has not given her the same reply as they gave another Minister ten months ago. There is a comprehensive network of CCTV cameras …

My frustration is that the Department of housing and the Department of justice seem to be operating in silos in relation to this. They do not seem to talk to one another. We are talking about €600,000 per year to plug the gap and ensure the continuation of this service. The irony is not lost on me of Government putting €58 million directly into infrastructure for the Ryder Cup, while we are talking about the live monitoring of the CCTV network that keeps the people of Limerick safe - not just Limerick city, it goes…

Thank you, Deputy.

The Deputy should conclude.

The Deputy is over time.

Deputy, you are way over time.

I call Deputy Fitzmaurice.

The Labour Party will not stand in the Minister's way with regard to what he is doing here. The basic principle of what he is trying to do is welcome, in terms of extending this to social homes. The issue I have, as has been alluded to throughout the debate, is with the actual scheme itself. We know that more than 2,400 social homes are estimated to have been affected by defective concrete blocks. This is an important step, but the issue I have is with the scheme itself, because it is fundamentally defective. It is…

Jesus.

That is not true.

Not true.