In that case, I do not know whether the Minister or Department has carried out any analysis of this area. What is the explanation for the decline in the number of recipients of invalidity pension? The number was about 55,000 in 2015, which rose to 59,000 in 2020, but the figure has fallen year on year to a low of just over 55,000 in 2024. There has been an increase of only 1% despite the population having significantly increased over ten years. The number in receipt of carer's allowance is up from 62,000 in 2015 to…

In response to the fuel crisis, other countries are rolling out additional services. Some are making public transport free, which we have called for for a long time. The Government did not provide any funding for new services in this budget. Will it reverse that decision in light of the fuel crisis? Will it provide additional funding for new services to be rapidly rolled out to alleviate the fuel and cost-of-living crisis and to enable us to get off the reliance on fossil fuels as quickly as possible?

To respond to the climate crisis and the cost-of-living and fuel crises, we need to rapidly roll out as much public transport as quickly as is possible. That is not what is currently happening. Dublin Bus is sitting on 50 new electric buses. They are expensive and very good quality presumably but they are sitting there not being used because of a lack of appropriate infrastructure. The oldest new electric bus has been sitting there since November 2023. We have owned this bus for two years and five months. It is not…

Yes, please.

I ask the Minister to give me a date for when all the electric buses will be in use. I would like that. I will hold him to it.

There are 50 brand new electric buses still not being used. The issue that the Minister did not come back to is that each time we add one of the electric buses, we are withdrawing a diesel bus. Why on earth are we doing that? Why are we not having more buses in the system? That is what we need. We need a lot of more buses. Why are we scrapping routes? We introduced the BusConnects routes. That is fine. Why are we withdrawing other routes as a consequence of that? For example, in my constituency, there is a campaign…

I was calling round to people's houses in Dublin Central the other night and met a woman who said to me "Everything's going up. My rent is going up" - she is a Dublin City Council tenant - "The price of petrol is going up. Groceries are going up. Everything is going up except for my wages." She is right. Statistically, that is the case. Prices are up almost a quarter over the past five years and people are really struggling out there. The Government's response suggests that it either does not get it or does not car…

I want to ask about corporate capture of the Government, enabling landlords to build shed-sits with no planning permission, to rent them out with no legal protections, to evict tenants at any time with no right of appeal, no reason and no basis to go to the RTB. Where did this dystopian idea come from? A corporate think-tank set up by the billionaire Collison brothers. Plugging the idea two years ago, Progress Ireland boasted that there could be 350,000 such shed-sits, and it said they could be built based on wheth…

It is its idea.

It is its idea.

The World Economic Forum is a place where billionaires and multimillionaires gather together with Heads of Government and Ministers. It is a place where the policy interests of the billionaire class are transmitted to their political representatives, the likes of the Taoiseach. In this country, the richest billionaires we have, who obviously are not resident, are the Collison brothers. They, like many of the tech bros, share a libertarian ideology about deregulation of everything, so-called YIMBYism, which has the …

Deputy Boyd Barrett spoke about the workers today.

He has to repeat the Kilmainham workers, though.

They are one of them.

For the family members, not for renters.

The new cost-of-living crisis underlines the need to get to 100% renewable energy as quickly as possible. For Ireland, that means developing offshore wind. It is quite incredible that for the past 20 years, successive Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael Governments have been in power and have failed to add any offshore wind energy to the grid. We have less offshore wind energy today than we did 20 years ago, despite all the talk of climate crisis and so on. Why? It is because the Government is relying on the private market a…

-----dependent on fossil fuels. We cannot control what we do not own.

Will the Government change course and switch to a public model?

Fianna Fáil was in government for a long time before that.

Will the Tánaiste join with me in calling for An Post to reverse the disastrous decision to move the sorting office for Dublin 16 out of Dublin 16, moving it from Edmondstown to Lucan. It makes no sense whatsoever. It is not clear where the public who miss packets and parcels are going to have to go to collect them. They may have to go all the way to Lucan to collect parcels that they miss. It certainly is clear that it will result in a worsened service for the public. The postal workers are going to be stuck on th…