I thank the Tánaiste. It is unusual we are 100% agreed on both sides of the House that this needs to happen. This is a health emergency and under Covid guidelines we were led to do an awful lot of things under health emergencies. We had John Wall with us yesterday as a patient safety advocate. We have an emergency. Why can we not use emergency powers and legislate that this happen now? We have the commitment of the House that it needs to happen now. The people of the mid-west need this now. The biggest thing here i…

Nobody wants to see people with addiction punished while the dealers get rich. In Limerick, Sr. Consilio in Cuan Mhuire has done an amazing job trying to help people with addiction. The centre has opened a farm and a garden centre to reintroduce people into the workplace. She has done brilliant work. A former hurler from Limerick, Ciaran Carey, has counselling services doing the same, using people who have suffered from addictions themselves, because they know what they are talking about. We see people doing all th…

It is not and putting out such a statement about Limerick does not help.

Sorry, we are here to help people. Branding Limerick like that is not nice. We are here to help people all the time, and Deputy Sheehan should not say such things. The whole country has a drug problem. Naming one place by itself is not right.

I support the motion. The Minister spoke about the Act. The Act should be something the Government reflects on when it comes to presidential election campaigns. This motion is about having people on the island of Ireland be allowed to vote in presidential elections. I am old school. For me, there are 32 counties in Ireland, not 26. I will never change from that. Out of respect for everyone in this country, I will say that it is the island of Ireland. In the farcical run-up to this presidential election, parties in …

I have some great friends with me today. I have been involved in Greybridge classic club for the past 15 years. The youngest member, Louise Crowley, is in the Gallery and she is the Limerick IFA chairperson - the youngest chairperson in the organisation. She has been a member of the club since it started and is also its secretary. The Macra na Feirme president and the outgoing president, Elaine Houlihan, are here as well. These people have been working around the area raising money for charities and people in need.…

I will supply his tractor.

What about the presidency?

I thank the Taoiseach for his vague answer. The bottom line is the taxpayer will pay regardless. The vintage clubs are very important to me for one reason along with the men's sheds and women's sheds. The vintage clubs look after our ancestors and our past and use it for the present to raise funds. The Taoiseach is right. I did leave Fianna Fáil a good number of years ago and am now a member of Independent Ireland, a political party for the people of Ireland. It gives me a voice which I did not have within the Fian…

So the taxpayer-----

It is to do with charity and raising funding.

I acknowledge and welcome the 9% VAT rate for hospitality, hairdressers and all the others concerned. However, when other budgets are put in place, measures apply straight away. If the price of diesel is going up, that can be done tonight, but when it is a cut in the VAT rate, people have to wait to July. A lot of businesses will not be in business by July because they were banking on the VAT rate coming down to sustain the three wage increases that have been applied in the past two and a half years. It is hard eno…

Fianna Fáil was once known as the workers' party; Fine Gael was once known as the farmers' party. Both parties have turned their back on the hard-working people who supported them and put them back into this House. They put the two fingers up to them and told them, "We don't care." Constituents voted for those parties or voted for me and I work for all of them. I work for everyone. I do not differentiate between parties and non-parties. They are coming to me now - these are people in their 70s, grass roots of parti…

People may know me as passionate. I am actually speechless after seeing what the Government has brought into the budget, and I am not often speechless. I also feel empathy for the people who work in this country. I have had families on to me again today saying they were hoping they would have something in this budget that would help them to survive. Instead, the more they work - and they are taking on extra hours - the more tax they are now paying. One man told me he got a wage increase, as did his wife. Now, the t…

Independent Ireland has looked for the means test to be abolished. It is not about the means test; it is about care. If we are practical about it, an awful lot of people could be outside the threshold because they may have been left something by a loved one or their partner might be working two jobs to try to put food on the table and it puts them outside the means test threshold. If we look at areas where we have no home help and where we cannot get care for people in this country, the Government has put an obstac…

On 1 May, I asked a parliamentary question about the cause of the high volume of refunds in employment permit applications, which was resulting in delays. People are able to get permits, on the one hand, from the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment but, on the other side, at the Department of justice, there are delays for visas. The left hand is doing one thing and the right hand is doing another and we have massive delays for critical workers. Can we not ensure one side talks to the other and streamline…

I am delighted to welcome the Ryder Cup to Ireland and that it will be in Limerick, the real capital of Ireland, as I call it. We now have a world-class golf tournament in Ireland. I have to thank the McManus family for what they have done not only for Limerick but the rest of the country and for what they have invested in this country and in Adare, County Limerick. I am delighted for the people of Adare that it will host the Ryder Cup. I am also thankful for what the McManus family has done for sports in Ireland. …

I met a man during the week who married a woman from County Tipperary. This is actually laughable. When the woman he married moved from County Tipperary to County Limerick, and went to renew her car insurance premium with the same company she has been insured with for the past 20 years, they charged her €179 more because she had moved to County Limerick. Even though the same person is driving the same car, she is being charged more because she got married and moved to County Limerick. When we tried to find out the …

I am going to give the Minister the answer today to solving a lot of the problems. I am in business all my life, so I treat politics like business - delivery on budget and on time. We are talking today about homelessness and child poverty. The overspend on the children's hospital is €853 million. I am the Chairperson of the Committee on Budgetary Oversight. We will have the Minister, Deputy Chambers, and the Minister, Deputy Donohoe, before us today. All I hear from the committee, which has been looking at the budg…

Value for money.