Has the Minister undertaken an equality and human rights impact assessment of the Department's practice of locating people with intellectual and similar disabilities in excess of 100 km from their home in residential services for prolonged periods of time? Will she comment on her Department's failure to maintain even broad-brush statistics on these distances given their clear breach of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, UNCRPD, which enshrines the right of community living for people with…

I thank the Minister of State for her response. It is very concerning to hear of the rapidly increasing investment by her Department in privately outsourced residential services for people with disabilities. In many cases a person will move into such a service in the context of a crisis. The HSE will be under pressure to find any place for the person. The residential service they are offered will quite likely be located extremely far from home and sometimes in quite an isolated setting that is not joined up to comm…

I thank the Minister of State. The Minister said in a recent budget Estimate session that she wants to move away from private outsourcing but the proportion of money the Department is spending on these services has nearly doubled over the past four years. While the Minister is saying one thing, her Department's actions are the opposite. I can understand the ongoing reliance on these providers but this will not change as long as the Department is devoid of a plan for residential, vocational and community support ser…

Why not cost for-----

Traffic congestion on the Whitegate to Midleton road has been like nothing on earth for months now. I know this well because I travel the road several times a week for a school trip. It is beyond frustrating for commuters to be left stewing in traffic as they are trying to get to work, school or crèche day-in, day-out. The road is at over capacity but the recent installation of traffic lights near the Lake View roundabout is the most recent factor in disrupting traffic flow. This is because the lights are operating…

It is not getting a response.

One of the most infuriating parts of the housing crisis is the tens of thousands of properties that have been left idle and decaying throughout the country. Youghal's potential to be on a par with Kinsale for economic prosperity and tourism has been thwarted by the epic scale of dereliction that has been allowed to take place there over many years. Likewise, Castlemartyr and Midleton have many prime-location properties left like deserted husks where boutiques could be flourishing or community hubs or accommodation …

We heard a lot during the last Government about how much more investment went into the National Parks and Wildlife Service but in east Cork and Waterford, the level of under-resourcing has been baffling. In east Cork, we have had no ranger for approximately 12 of the last 15 years. There has been no district conservation officer for 18 months and no regional manager in place for years over east Cork and Waterford. It is difficult to give precise figures for these vacancies, because the Department has been incredibl…

I raise a very important issue with the Minister of State. While I am grateful to her for being here, I am conscious that in her role she will not have decision-making capacity on it. It is disappointing not to see the Department of Health represented by either the senior Minister or a junior ministerial colleague. A cohort of healthcare workers has been in receipt of special Covid leave with pay, which is essentially their basic salary, over the past four to five years in recognition of the fact that they contract…

It is despairing to receive that response. It is so completely out of touch with the reality of these workers' circumstances. There is no security that comes from being on standard sick leave. That is just a pathway to medical retirement. There is no rationale given as to why this basic financial support is being ripped away at this arbitrary cut-off date. The health condition of these workers has not changed. As social protection Minister in the previous Government, Heather Humphreys, according to reports from 202…

I commend my colleague, Deputy Whitmore, on introducing this important Bill, which, if not obstructed, will greatly strengthen our dog breeding regulations. Unfortunately, it seems the Government is kicking the Bill into touch, which means it will be in limbo for 12 months at least. It is important to say that the Government is prone to frequent whinging that if only the Opposition could make constructive suggestions instead of complaining, it would happily work with us. This is patently shown up here, as with so m…

A group of approximately 120 healthcare workers face the termination of their basic pay on 31 December. They have been receiving their basic pay in recognition of the fact that they contracted Covid at the peak of the pandemic in high-risk settings such as hospital wards and have paid an enormous price in the form of ongoing long Covid symptoms, including debilitating post-exertional malaise. While we will be looking forward to rest and leisure over the Christmas period, these healthcare workers face the loss of th…

I want to pay tribute to Cara Darmody's determination on the assessments of need crisis and welcome Cara and her dad, Mark, here today. There are now over 18,000 children whose assessment of need is overdue. The Government is spending many millions of euro fighting in the courts some of these families who are trying to have their right to an assessment of need upheld. At the same time, the Government is imposing recruitment restrictions on the very services in primary care where many of these children should be see…

Investor courts are a serious threat to progressive public policy. They cast an ominous cloud over climate action at a time when climate action has never been more urgent or consequential. Ratifying CETA would see the introduction of investor courts that bring no benefit to the Irish people but allow foreign companies to extract money from the Irish taxpayer based on their perceived loss of profits. The Government is blindly walking down a path. Passing the Bill would see us introduce an investor court system when …

The crisis in assessments of need sits within a much broader picture of chronic neglect, by successive Governments, of the disability sector generally and, within that, the front-line disability services and children's disability network teams, as well as, more egregiously, the primary care services. We cannot meaningfully address the crisis in assessments of need in the absence of a reckoning with that context and without acknowledging the undeniable fact that primary care services had been under-resourced for yea…

When I asked the Taoiseach about flood relief for east Cork villages last week, he accused me of being sly in how I had raised the question. That adjective could be more fairly levelled at his British counterpart, Keir Starmer, who built his political career on the basis of being a human rights lawyer and unifier of the left. In power, he has enthusiastically supported the imprisonment of people for years who protest against climate inaction, along with the designation of protesters of genocide as terrorists. I ful…

There was a health committee session last week on the regulation of counselling and psychotherapy. In standards it has published, CORU has adopted a position that is entirely at odds with the main representative groups of those disciplines, which will reduce supervision requirements and remove mandatory personal therapy for trainees. These changes, if implemented, will degrade professional standards and undermine patient safety. CORU is showing a remarkable level of intransigence on these fundamentals of safe pract…

Has the Minister, her immediate predecessor or anyone in her Department engaged with the UK authorities regarding the Palestine Action group, which was proscribed as a terrorist organisation by the UK Government in July? The group was blacklisted for instigating a number of direct action protests against weapons manufacturers involved in selling arms to Israel in the context of its campaign of genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza against the civilian population there since October 2023.

The UK Government has, in an Orwellian inversion of truth, conflated protest against genocide with terrorism through its proscription of the Palestine Action group, placing it, absurdly, on the same blacklist as organisations such as al-Qaeda and ISIS. Since the Palestine Action group has been designated a terrorist organisation, at least 2,300 people have been arrested according to the group Defend Our Juries, and a large proportion of these arrests took place at peaceful, sit-in protests in public areas across Au…

The acclaimed and best-selling Irish author, Sally Rooney, was unable to collect her recent Sky Arts award for literature in person as she did not feel safe entering the UK due to the risk of arrest for her public support of Palestine Action. She has even had to cancel all future public engagements in the UK and has expressed concerns that because of her intention to support Palestine Action financially, the availability of her books in the UK could be affected. One of the leading Irish authors of our time does not…