This seems like an incredible situation. It is very stressful and shocking for the parents. Literally, on Monday gone they got a notification that their crèche place would be gone. What are they meant to do? They rely on this crèche. There are 44 kids in the crèche in TU Dublin in Tallaght. It is a mixture of children of staff, students and people from the community. If this goes ahead, the impact will be horrendous. One mother is quoted in the Tallaght Echo as saying she is in her second year of college and might …

Any parent, and many others, will know that getting your child into a crèche is no small task these days. As far as I know, there are massive waiting lists for every crèche in Tallaght. A solution must be found for the crèche in TU Dublin. It is fine if that solution involves relocation to somewhere in the area. There may be an idea that many of these parents are going to find alternative crèches in January, but that is just not going to happen. If TU Dublin or Oakview knew that this was only going to run until Dec…

I thank the Social Democrats for bringing forward this motion. What does it tell us about the sort of society and economy we live in that while most people are really suffering, with over 300,000 people in arrears and almost half of parents saying they are struggling to put adequate food on the table for their children, the electricity companies are making record profits? It tells us that the cost-of-living crisis is not a crisis for everyone. In fact, it is an opportunity for those at the top. The cost-of-living c…

Let us be honest about what is happening here with the new proposed citizenship Bill. This is the latest episode of Jim O'Callaghan trying to clamber his way to the top of Fianna Fáil on the backs of vulnerable people. In this case, it is the people who make our health services work, who are part of our communities and who contribute to our society. Jim O’Callaghan is making himself out to be the hard man on immigration so that he can become leader of Fianna Fáil. It is a solution to a problem that simply does not …

What about in Palestine?

In recent days, there have been attempts to smear the good people of the Garvaghy Road as a mob. It brings to mind what James Connolly wrote about the concept of the mob, as in ordinary people. He wrote that the period where the mob had no power "was the blackest period in human history". He described the mob as a humanising civilising force and finished with the call of "All hail, then, to the mob, the incarnation of progress!" I had the pleasure of standing with this so-called mob over the weekend. They were the …

At the UN General Assembly, the Taoiseach said that "we, the collected international community, have failed Palestine". I could not agree more. The problem is that this applies to his Government as well. I know the Taoiseach finds this incredibly frustrating because he thinks he should just get applause for saying the right things, or some of the right things, about Palestine and should not be criticised for the lack of action. However, it is not unreasonable for us to say that the words have to be backed up by act…

Why is the Government using its Presidency of the European Council to propose a massive undermining of the right of privacy of European citizens? The Irish Presidency has a proposal for the digital omnibus, which is a deregulation agenda in the interests of big tech. What it proposes is that, effectively, GDPR be disapplied when it comes to AI. As a result, the use of personal data will be presumed to be lawful as long as it is being used in terms of AI. This means that what currently would be illegal, which is col…

I thank Deputy Ahern and the Labour Party for bringing forward this Bill. I congratulate the Deputy on his first Bill . He will be happy to hear that, unlike the Government, we will be supporting it. We support what is an attempt to place some limits on data centres being automatically allowed to connect to the national electricity grid, regardless of any consideration of environmental and social costs. We think the time for moderate measures has passed. We should not be having any more data centres connecting to t…

I move amendment No. 1 to amendment No. 1: To delete all words from "notes that the Government:" to "will seek to address this as part of Budget 2027" and substitute the following: "recognises that: — working people, families, students, households and pensioners are facing renewed and significant increases in the cost of fuel and energy, as well as increases in public transport fares, adding further pressure to an already severe cost-of-living crisis; and — the Government is directly contributing to this cost-of-li…

Deputy O'Flynn explicitly supported the kidnapping in Venezuela.

It is almost two years since Dr. Abu Safiya was detained by the Israeli occupying forces. His crime was to not abandon his hospital in Gaza. He is being held in solitary confinement. He is being kicked, beaten and tortured every single day. He has not been charged with any crimes. He is just one of hundreds of thousands of victims of Israel's genocide, brutality and occupation. It is scandalous that the Minister stands in this Chamber again and again to talk about genocide but he will not say that our football team…

Do something then.

This Bill sums up everything that is wrong with the Government's approach to disability services in this country. We have a crisis, with families crying out for help, and here we have a Bill that is not about investing in the health and education professionals needed to operate a properly functioning system. The Bill is not about addressing that in Chamber House CDNT, where well over 1,000 files simply have not been opened, there is a vacancy rate of more than 50% in some professions and a rate of one third across …

On an annualised basis on a five-year-----

The Minister is defending the indefensible. That is why he did not really engage with it. He is defending the fact that, when 300,000 people are in arrears on their electricity bills, data centres owned by the richest and most powerful companies in the world are paying half the price the poorest people in the country are expected to pay. He is defending the absolutely indefensible. He is saying that we cannot possibly say that these, the richest companies in the world, which provide very few jobs as we will get ont…

Why? It is because we cannot meet any of our targets. We are going to reach a point well under half of our targets, which are supposed to be legally binding, because the data centres have gobbled up all of the renewable energy. Sometimes when the Minister talks about this he gives the impression that, as long as we keep adding renewable energy, it is good for the climate. The climate does not care. The planet cares about the amount of greenhouse gases. If you are adding extra renewables but all of that additional c…

Earlier, the Minister said that 19,000 are directly employed in data centres. Does the Minister stand over that?

Great, because he will have to correct the record later as that is not what is in his record. The Minister knows he is fiddling the figures because that 19,000 figure - it is 19,500 - is coming from the KPMG report, on which the Minister spent €105,000 of public money to get. He told them we only want this outcome, that is, to say data centres are really important. Most of those jobs are construction jobs. There are not 19,000 people in working data centres directly in this country. The Minister knows that is not t…

They could be building houses. That is the other way this is affecting the housing crisis. There are more than 10,000 of these workers who are spending their time building data centres and they are purely temporary jobs. The KPMG report actually says these jobs will disappear once we have built all of the data centres. The workers could instead be building housing. What is the actual figure? How many people actually work in data centres? The Minister's own report, which is a report designed to support the case for …