I am not trying to cause panic, but we need to be prepared. We have seen the virus on the boat in the Canary Islands. What if it was a more resilient and transmissible virus? What if the Iranian war or other conflicts prevented us from getting as many boats to this country? That is the issue. Food Vision 2030 is based on exports and farm income diversification. It is not about having a national food security plan. My understanding is that there is such a plan in the Netherlands. Even within an EU context, we need a…

I welcome elements of the National Safety Camera Strategy in terms of expanding our safety camera network to 1,900 zones and targeting the high collision black spots. However, we cannot ignore the sheer scale of the violations occurring everywhere in my constituency and elsewhere. We need a lot more cameras and enforcement after it is handed over to TII. Equally, we have to look at the smaller roads and local authority areas also. Let us look at bus lanes, for example. An Garda Síochána issues over 6,000 fixed-char…

I am in solidarity with the ambulance workers but I want to take the opportunity to praise the fantastic work of our nurses on what is International Nurses Day. There are over 92,000 registered nurses and midwives in Ireland who all do a fantastic job, but their working conditions are far from optimal. They have raised issues like unsafe staffing numbers, high levels of burnout and pay that has failed to keep up with the cost of living. Ireland relies to a much greater extent on internationally educated nurses comp…

As others have said, people are fed up, exhausted and worn down by the current energy crisis. Some of those already challenged to make ends meet - those with disabilities, for example, or those on very low incomes - are now living hand to mouth and cutting back on food just to keep a bit of heat and light, and that is before the darker winter months crawl back in again. We have also found out that small businesses are hanging on. I have spoken to quite a few in my constituency. We see that prices always shoot up in…

I move: That Dáil Éireann: notes that: — family law proceedings concerning child custody, access, guardianship and childcare matters, continue to be heard otherwise than in public under statutory provisions including, Section 27 of the Guardianship of Infants Act, 1964, and Section 29 of the Child Care Act, 1991; — the recently published book entitled "Justice for Birth Mothers – The Fight Against Forced Separation in Modern Ireland", documents numerous experiences of women who report feeling disempowered, unheard …

As I pointed out earlier, fathers have been shown to be damaged under the current flawed system, and I have been very sure to mention this aspect, but the system has hurt mothers a lot more. It is unfair, opaque and needs to change. I mentioned Dr. Charlotte Proudman, one of several advocates in the UK. Her research found that the secrecy and gender bias in family courts in England concealed poor practice and a lack of accountability. There is no reason to believe it is not the case here that there is a systemic ge…

-----podcast and recently published book. I would like to see more transparency in the interests of the children and to pilot what is already happening in the UK.

I have contributed to many of these debates because, like many others, I appreciate the hardship that people are going through and because Fingal is situated in my constituency. On the one hand, I welcome that there is a scheme proposed for Fingal, Wexford and other counties in terms of remediation for defective concrete blocks. Piecemeal as it is, as many others have said, I will not be opposing it. However, no more than the rest of it, the scheme is still not fit for purpose. It is not sufficient for people who n…

I would like to visit the issue of people being able to build modular homes in their gardens and subdivide them because it is a hugely important issue. It is definitely not a panacea for the housing crisis but it will help in certain situations. For example, yesterday I had a gentleman on to me worried that the legislation will not cover an area where the person who has a big enough house and wants to live on the garden and rent out the house. There are a lot of older people who want to live in the ground floor of …

Yes, for families but not investor-landlords.

The Government seriously needs to reassess and reconfirm its commitment to imminently provide the full extension and refurbishment project promised to Lucan Community College going back to 2010. We are talking about dedicated classrooms for children with special educational needs, physical education space and refurbishment. The current piecemeal solution of a reduced phase 1 and temporary repurposing of some rooms for special educational needs and reviewing the situation in relation to the originally promised phase…

The school has had to take the decision to subdivide rooms and to move students in order to have special educational needs classes in a setting that is not going to disturb students. I will give a few quotes from parents. Parents have said that every month that passes is actively harming children, that the school is not fit for purpose, that children with additional needs have been failed despite explicit promises and that children are stressed, more constrained and are falling behind through no fault of their own.…

As Deputy Cummins said, Ireland declared a climate and biodiversity emergency back in 2019. This motion aims to renew that because absolutely nothing has happened. It is a bit like St. Augustine when he said, "Grant me chastity and continence, Lord, but not yet". We talk the talk, but we never walk the climate action walk, and that is a depressing fact. I do not have time in two minutes to talk about biodiversity but my statements on biodiversity were made quite recently and are on the Dáil record. However, I do wa…

Cuirim fáilte roimh an Aire Stáit. I note that in Brussels in March, the key areas were again Ukraine and the €195 billion or so in support. Since then, we have had the Hungarian election, which, as others have noted, will hopefully free things up. I hope that at the informal meeting in Cyprus tomorrow and the day after, we will receive some signs of positive engagement from the Hungarian side, if we have not already done so.

I missed that because I was at a committee meeting. It is fantastic to hear. The Middle East is going to come up again, I am sure, just as it did before. You never know from one day to the next what is going to happen. The last thing I heard related to the status of the blockade. I know matters are complex because of the historical and neighbourly relations some member states have with Israel, but we seem to be letting the genocide, the occupation of Gaza and the occupied territories fall through the cracks. I am a…

I welcome this Bill. I have been critical of the Government in lots of areas but I have to say that this legislation is a positive further step in protecting the health of all our citizens but especially our children. It would be remiss of me not to be a bit critical and say that I am not sure if it is enough in itself because we are dealing with what I would call a subversive and well-resourced industry. We think back to the Philip Morris days in the 1950s. The industry is still finding clever ways to sneak in and…

I want to spend some time addressing an issue I have referenced before, namely the growing crisis of so-called parking wars and the service charge-related instability that is turning home ownership into a nightmare in many of our new communities. I give the examples of the Clonburris and Adamstown strategic development zones, SDZs, in my constituency, with which my independent colleague Councillor Helen Farrell, who I welcome to the Public Gallery, will be all too familiar, as will the Minister of State, Deputy Eme…

The council is only implementing the legislation it is told to implement. When I tried to get a major department store into the Adamstown SDZ, council officials refused and said it would upset the retail hierarchy because Tallaght and Liffey Valley are the two main retail centres. Therefore, anyone living in Adamstown has to go to Liffey Valley. Buses on the L51 and L52 routes do not turn up half of the time, so people are going to have to drive to do a proper shop. Unfortunately, they cannot get the train to Liffe…

I welcome the opportunity to speak on the Air Pollution (Amendment) Bill 2025. This is legislation we have been promised for a fair couple of years and attempts to respond to a very real public health challenge that often does not get as much attention as it should. It also updates a framework that we have not kept pace with in terms of the scale of the problem across the country. The EPA air quality in Ireland 2023 report reminds us that air pollution, according to those figures, causes an estimated 1,700 prematur…

We are moving the focus in the debate towards solutions for people to reduce their energy bills. I welcome this motion. As I said before, we need to be moving towards giving better grants for solar in households, including in the very short term plug-in solar. You can now go into Lidl in the UK and get some of these, which would cut your bills straight away. The focus of much of the debate has been on the short-term pressure and how the Government did not respond enough or fast enough to it. We have said that. I fi…