Conor Sheehan
Limerick City · Labour Party · Ireland
“If a student does not have access to one of these devices or access to one at home, there is often no alternative and that could leave them excluded. Many families are forced to pay hundreds and thousands, particularly with the rising cost of microchips, for these devices.”
“I thank the Minister for her considered response. We need to get rid of voluntary contributions and move to generic school uniforms. This is something that has been done in the UK.”
“This digital divide is resulting in a severe and growing level of inequality where so many communities, students and families are unable to purchase the devices they desperately need for their children's education.”
“I raise the issue of the community access support team, CAST, in Limerick, which has prevented 133 detentions under section 12 of the Mental Health Act and reduced the number emergency department presentations. It has responded to over 1,000 incidents.”
“Do not worry. We need to have a debate this week before the House rises about the imminent report on Aughinish Alumina. There are up to 2,000 direct and indirect jobs at stake in Limerick. We cannot have a situation where the State is inadvertently complicit in the export of alumina to Russia. Where there is a will, there is a way.”
“It is absolutely reprehensible that planning permission has been granted for apartments on the site of the former mother and baby home at Bessborough. We have 19 mothers and 859 infants associated with Bessborough still missing. Now 140 apartments are going to be built on a mass grave. We need statements on this next week.”
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“We will see this with rental properties as well, where rental properties will be misrepresented on platforms as being essentially fake apartments or houses.”
“The image I am holding up is not a real image but an AI-generated image of the front of a house on daft.ie at the moment. Estate agents are more and more posting AI-generated false images on platforms like Daft. This is misleading. It is also predatory at a time when the housing situation is so bad. The response from the advertising regulator, however, has been effectively that it is fine provided there is a tiny label at the bottom. I am very concerned about this practice because it is something we have seen in other jurisdictions and is one of the growing challenges we have in terms of artificial intelligence. With the new AI office being set up in August, what will the Government do about the likes of this?”
“School secretaries, caretakers and probably special needs assistants, SNAs, and teachers now, have all gone out on strike and 18- and 19-year-olds are paid less than the minimum wage. The fact of the matter is that this Government has a magic money tree provided that you are a property developer, an institutional developer or a fast food tycoon. They will be looked after and the rest of us have to pay.”
“There are much stronger sectoral agreements. My bottom line is this: if the job works on Wi-Fi, it does not need diesel. What I would say when I look at big business in this country is that if your management style only works when people are sitting in front of you, that is not leadership or mentoring; that is control freakery. The reality that is evident with regard to this Bill this morning and other matters is this is not a Government for workers. This is the most anti-worker Government I can remember in recent years. Fine Gael constantly says it will make work pay but the reality is that under Fine Gael, it is workers who have to pay. This Government has delayed the living wage and backslided on the increases in sick pay.”
“The Minister of State cannot really compare us to the Continent because most of these things are delivered through collective bargaining.”
“It allows young working professionals to avail of lower house prices and contribute to their local economy and community. The Government's so-called work-life balance legislation is so weak and watery that workers are being marched back in to the office. The Minister of State talks about us being a leader on this. In countries like Portugal, if you have a child up to the age of eight you have a statutory right to work from home without prior negotiation. In 2022, the Dutch Parliament, under a centre-right government, made working from home a legal right. If an employer in the Netherlands declines it, they have to provide a weighty business or safety reason to do so. The burden of proof that is being placed on the company in these jurisdictions is much higher than it is here.”
“If the Minister of State looks at the TomTom Traffic Index, he will see that people in Limerick - the city I represent - lost 74 hours in traffic congestion last year. That is three whole days wasting away at the Mackey roundabout, on the Corbally Road, in Raheen, on the Dock Road, on Henry Street, on the M20 and on the N7 - the list goes on. What this Government is doing in opposing our Bill here is saying to people that this is grand and that they can spend an entire week of their lives in the car every single year. Remote working has benefited our city and region enormously. It has enabled people to move home from cities like Dublin, where they would have had to live because they work there, to raise their families and have a better quality of life.”
“We need to see further action on this, we need to go further and we need to be explicit. Investment funds should not be competing with families for family homes and this is another way that Government is failing in terms of housing. While this is not a silver bullet, it is a step we can take to rebalance housing in this country back towards ordinary people.”
“It has not been solved by the Minister's own metrics and it certainly has not been solved for the many thousands of young ordinary working people in this country who have had their dream and their hard-earned ambition towards that realistic aspiration of purchasing a home quashed by one of these institutional investors in terms of a vulture fund or cuckoo fund. If the Government is proud of its record on housing, and if the Minister thinks he is going in the right direction, why not tighten up what the Government did in 2021. If the owner-occupier guarantee is an achievement that the Minister wants to trumpet, why not go further and make it an actual guarantee? I constantly hear Fianna Fáil trumpet that it is, apparently, the party of homeownership but what it is doing here does stack up?”
“It is very disappointing to see the Government's response to this motion in terms of the Minister's countermotion because the response reads like the response to every Private Members' motion on housing in this House. We, on this side of the House, put forward policy proposals and we get stonewalled by Government. I cannot understand why the Government cannot bring itself to accept that the situation as it currently stands in relation to bulk buying is less than perfect when it has nearly said that in the programme for Government. The Minister is playing politics with the countermotion and is trying to convince us that this problem has been solved but it has not been solved.”
“To be fair to this motion, and to the proposers, it effectively calls on the Government to do something that is already in the programme for Government because it calls on the Government keep the stamp duty surcharges under review to ensure they prohibit bulk purchases but it is clear that the current rate of stamp duty is not doing that. While the Government accepts theoretically, in terms of policy, that there should be no place in the housing market for these kind of bulk buys, surely it can recognise in what is being proposed here that what it is doing is not working and there are still hundreds of these purchases happening every year at twice the rate at which they were when the Government initially introduced the limited restrictions in 2021.”
“Whatever they want, they eventually end up getting. When an intervention fails, we move on. What is quite ironic and quite funny about this countermotion is that, in a weird way, it nearly asks for credit for missing the housing targets. The Government has made much of a deal, or attempted to in the past couple of weeks, about the delivery of the 36,000 but we, on this side of the House, remember the 40,000 homes, the figure that was supposed to be delivered before the election. It is almost as if Government is looking for credit, looking for gratitude and looking for thanks for under-performance and for not delivering on its targets.”
“We set out the mechanisms by which we wanted to allow ordinary Irish people to invest the sums they have on deposit in social and affordable housing and to give people a return on their savings but also to allow people to invest in a sustainable and a controlled way and a way that has worked in other jurisdictions, such as Austria. What we have with this Government constantly is an approach to housing that puts private developers and institutional investors on a pedestal. They can do no wrong. The fact of the matter is we consistently have public housing targets that are missed year after year. The Government has never met its targets for social and affordable housing. It will not do so this year. We have an approach that is constantly chasing these developers, these institutional investors, including I-RES.”
“The fact of the matter is that the sort of straw man arguments the Government comes in here with on housing will not cut it. We know there needs to be a role for private investment. I recognise that it has a role to play in boosting supply but supply alone will not solve this crisis. The Government will belatedly find that out in years to come. Ordinary families and ordinary working people should not be pitched against sprawling investment funds and German pension funds when trying to purchase their first home. It is wrong. The State must take a radically more active role in the provision of housing. In our manifesto before the previous election, we set out how we wanted to scale up and transition the LDA into a State construction company.”
“We have not solved this problem because when we introduced the limited measures in 2021 to try to deal with this problem, the figures that were there around the bulk buying of homes were actually half of what they are at the moment. They went up in 2021, 2022 and 2023 and in 2025, they were at twice the level they were at in 2021. That only counts the purchases covered by the higher rate of stamp duty. Those numbers do not tell us about any purchases of up to nine houses at a time. They do not tell us about the apartment blocks where large numbers of homes have been bought by institutional investors, particularly in Dublin. The Minister will come in here and say we need private investment, as he has done. I am not disputing that.”
“We hear the Government is apparently declaring war on vacancy and dereliction. We hear the Government is introducing measures to incentivise supply while at the same time absolutely screwing renters. What we see are the statistics getting worse. The number of people who are homeless is climbing. House prices are going up. Rents are increasing. When it comes to this issue of institutional investors, maybe we, as a collective, have been too quiet because no ordinary working person can compete with a cuckoo fund. The fact of the mater is the countermotion Government has tabled claims that we have solved this problem.”
“We are not helping spiralling prices faced by ordinary renters, which the Bill last week will make even worse. This motion is a reminder that this issue still exists, despite what the Government might claim. In the five years since the previous Government took limited action on this, at least 2,000 homes have been bulk bought by institutional investors. That means hundreds of homes have been taken off the market and hundreds of ordinary, decent, hardworking people have been deprived of the chance to find their first home, start a family and achieve the milestones that would be otherwise considered normal and are often so delayed because of this Government's housing policy. Week after week, we talk about housing. I hear the same thing from the Government constantly.”
“Young people cannot compete with these investor funds. In particular, they cannot compete with cuckoo funds that are going in and buying up second-hand homes, which are generally slightly cheaper homes. I think of somebody who is an ordinary working person and somebody like my sister who is 27 years of age and is a nurse. She has actually emigrated now. I think of people in her peer group who just cannot compete as people who would be able to avail of mortgages with these cuckoo funds, in particular. I support this motion. We need to be clear that when we see investment funds purchasing what should be family homes, we are making the housing crisis worse. We are locking ordinary families out of home ownership and we are driving house prices even higher.”
“In Limerick, the average price of a three-bed, semi-detached house is now €345,000. It has gone up 13.8% in a year. It has gone up 40% in five years. This issue of bulk buying by investors is one of the reasons behind house price inflation in Limerick. Some experts say it can account for up to 20%, or one third, of house price inflation. Why did the Government take some action in 2021? It is important to remember that action was taken on foot of what I can only describe as intense political pressure and a really loud and sustained outcry about what happened in Mullen Park in Maynooth, as my colleague, Deputy Cronin, referenced earlier. Despite the restrictions that were introduced then, institutional investors - vulture funds and cuckoo funds - bought €580 million worth of property in the past year.”
“I want to come back in on that. Numerous cases were upheld by the RTB where it was found that this provision was abused with people being evicted from their property. What I am trying to do in this amendment is simply to tighten it up where there is a specific risk to the tenant being made homeless. That is all.”
“Emergency accommodation in Limerick is often at capacity. On Monday, a man attended my clinic wondering how he would explain to his autistic child that the family were going to be made imminently homeless. Things have gotten so bad at this stage that all I am looking for with the first amendment is a breathing space and with the second amendment, to tighten up that provision to ensure that people are not being evicted on spurious grounds.”
“In relation to my other amendment, there was 35% surge in evictions after the moratorium was lifted. I am not arguing for a permanent eviction moratorium. I am arguing for a moratorium to give us some breathing space. We will not get to it, but this is in a similar vein to why I tabled an amendment in relation to a rent break if rents exceeded 15% within a three-year period. When the eviction moratorium was in place, family homelessness fell by 39%. Like every Deputy and I am sure the Minister included, my constituency clinics are inundated with notices to quit. At this stage, I have over 100 notices to quit on the books in my office. I do not know what to tell people because in many cases they are being forced to leave their homes and if they are lucky, they will get emergency accommodation.”
“If the Minister is not going to accept amendment No. 9, I plead with him to accept amendment No. 38. This amendment proposes to amend the table in section 34 of the 2004 Act, which sets out the ground for the termination of a tenancy. The ground specified in paragraph four of the table is that "the landlord requires the dwelling or the property containing the dwelling for his or her own occupation or for occupation by a member of his or her family". In my view and in the opinion of many people, this provision is much abused. This amendment proposes a balancing exercise that use for a family member should not be a ground for evicting a tenant if the tenant would be placed at risk of homelessness. Politics is about choices. The choice the Minister is making is going to increase homelessness. That is a fact. It is going to put rents up.”
“During that period, there was a statutory pause on all termination notices. We are in an emergency period now, as has been discussed at length. The Dáil has long since declared and recognised the housing crisis to be a national emergency. Under this section, there would be a similar ban, this time for three years from the passing of the Bill, on all termination notices and evictions.”
“I move amendment No. 9: In page 6, between lines 13 and 14, to insert the following: “ Notices of termination: temporary ban 3 . Notwithstanding any other provision of this Act or any other enactment or rule of law, the period of 3 years commencing on the passing of this Act is deemed to be an emergency period within the meaning and for the purposes of section 5 of the Emergency Measures in the Public Interest (Covid-19) Act 2020 and that section, with the exception of subsection (6)(b), applies accordingly.”. This amendment introduces a new section to the Bill concerning a temporary ban on notices of termination. The section would, in effect, reintroduce the emergency period, which we remember from Covid-19. The emergency period was provided for by the Emergency Measures in the Public Interest (Covid-19) Act 2020.”
“I move amendment No. 8: In page 6, between lines 13 and 14, to insert the following: “ Impact forecast 3 . The Minister shall, as soon as may be after the passing of this Act, but not later than 6 months thereafter, prepare and publish, including publication by electronic means, a statement of forecasts for the following period of 10 years following its publication in respect of the impact of the amendments effected by this Act on market rents for a representative sample of tenancies, together with such other information as the Minister may deem appropriate for the purposes of this section.”.”
“I move amendment No. 7: In page 6, between lines 13 and 14, to insert the following: “ Review of Act 3. The Minister shall, not later than 2 years after the passing of this Act, conduct a review of the operation and effectiveness of amendments effected by this Act and shall, not later than 3 months after the end of that period of 2 years, or on the completion of the review, whichever is the earlier, make a report, in writing, to each House of the Oireachtas of the findings of the review and of the conclusions drawn from those findings.”.”
“With regard to my amendment in particular and my request for an impact forecast on amendment No. 8, if the Minister is so certain that this is a permanent solution, which I do not believe it is, where is the modelling to forecast what it is going to do to rents in the private rental market over the next number of years?”
“The fact the Government has not met the targets it has set itself since Housing for All was introduced in 2021 really highlights that it is looking in the wrong place for a solution to the problem. This Bill will not improve the situation. It certainly will not arrest rising rents or rising homelessness. The Minister should lay before the House a report setting out exactly the modelling for the Bill. We have all gone through the RTB figures and done the calculations. The evidence, as it has been laid out by me and by other speakers, is absolutely frightening. These measures will devastate renters, who are the most vulnerable people in the housing system at the moment.”
“I agree with him about the need for increased supply and for private sector investment, but this Bill will not deliver anywhere near the level of private sector investment needed to meet housing need, particularly in areas outside Dublin and very niche parts of Cork. The reality is that for every year since 2021, the Government has been 2,000 units or more below its completion targets. It will fail again this year to meet the target. The Minister referred to the crisis in the rental market and the homelessness crisis. I always think of the key recommendation of the Housing Commission that social and affordable housing should make up 20% of all housing stock. At present, that proportion is around 10%.”
“Large institutional investors will not get enough of a yield from building expensive build-to-rent apartments there because there is no demand for them. The Minister talked about record investment but the outcomes of that investment are, by and large, incredibly poor. I am always astonished when I hear members of the Government talking about affordable housing provision, given that approximately 35% of what is counted as affordable housing actually comes from vacant property refurbishment grants. The Minister has not addressed my simple question as to what the forecasted impact of this Bill will be on rents in the private rental market for the rest of 2026, for 2027 and for 2028. The fact he is pushing this legislation through without being able to answer that question is frightening.”
“The fact the Minister has not challenged that assertion in any of his responses is telling. It will become too politically difficult for the Government to sustain a situation where rents are allowed to be reset to market rate and to increase by anything up to 15%. If we are not back here discussing this next year, we certainly will be back here before the local elections. Where will we be then? Will people be paying €3,000 a month in rent? In fact, on daft.ie right now, there is a two-bedroom apartment just around the corner from this building that is for rent for more than €3,000. What will happen as a result of this Bill is that if we get any new supply at all, it will largely comprise build-to-rent units that most ordinary working people cannot afford. There certainly will not be any supply in Limerick city, which I represent.”
“The Minister did not meaningfully address my amendments in his response to them. He spoke about Standing Order 197. The types of reports referenced under that Standing Order came in as part of political reform in 2011. They are often delayed, sometimes for two, three or four years in respect of certain legislation. God knows where we will be four years from now. There is no proper, thorough and standardised approach to how these reports are done. In 2017, the Oireachtas Library and Research Service did a very good analysis of the reports. It found they had been done in a very ad hoc way and that no committee has undertaken a review of any enacted legislation on foot of a post-enactment report. The reason I brought forward these amendments is that we know the Bill will cause rents to increase.”
“We will have a situation of the average length of a tenancy being between three and three and a half years, when it is ordinary working people, people on low incomes, who will have to, in some cases, pay 40%, 50% or 60% of their hard earned income on rent. This will absolutely crush them and the Minister has not set out at all empirically what this Bill will do to rents in the private rental sector. As I said earlier, more of this was done when Simon Coveney introduced the Bill at the end of 2016 which introduced RPZs.”
“Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael backbenchers will come here tonight and they will not have the foggiest notion of what they are voting on because this Bill is so confusing and convoluted. For example, the restrictions for larger landlords should be applied universally because the tenants of larger landlords are usually tenants in build to rent properties, properties owned by institutional investors. Their rent is already unbelievably expensive and these properties are rarely, if ever, sold. For the tenants of the new so-called smaller landlords, not much effectively changes and the fact is that people should not be condemned to rent increases of 20% and possibly 30%.”
“The general public, and most important the tens of thousands of renters who are terrified of the effects of this Bill, are entitled to know what the impact of these proposals will be, how much extra rent they will be forced to pay. It is beyond irresponsible to push a Bill like this through in less than 12 hours if the Minister cannot make such a forecast and if he does not and cannot model what the Bill will do, how it will affect rent levels in the coming decade, how much renters will pay and what the outcome of the Bill will be in terms of this so-called supply. We have asked questions like this nearly half a dozen times since the general scheme was published and I constantly get the same answer. What will we see with this Bill? For example, there will be new categories of landlord.”
“There needs to be a statutory duty on the Minister to examine what he has done, what the effects are and to come back to the House. Amendment No. 8 is similar. It is to insert a new section 3, with the heading "Impact forecast". It requires the Minister, within not more than six months after the Bill is passed, to publish a statement of the forecast of the impact of the Bill on market rents for the following years. The reason the Government has not done any modelling like this is that it knows that fundamentally what we are saying about rent levels, what we have calculated from looking at the RTB data, is what will transpire, if it is not worse, certainly in the short term. In this amendment, I am looking for the forecast to relate to a representative sample of tenancies.”
“7, the purpose of which is to require the Minister and the Government to conduct a review of the operation and effectiveness of all amendments made by this Bill to the Residential Tenancies Act to include findings and conclusions and that the review be laid before the Oireachtas. The Minister constantly talks about the need to incentivise supply, but we have not had any clarity about what this Bill will do, bar our analysis of what it will do to rent levels. There is no certainty that it will deliver anything like the level of supply needed to arrest the upward trend in rents. Rents have gone up by the bones of 100% in Dublin, for example, in over a decade and they will go up and up again. I simply do not believe this Bill will work. The Minister has not laid the evidence before us to show how this Bill will work.”
“It is not for smaller SME builders. It is certainly not for renters. The Government constantly talks about balance. I find that term offensive in relation to this Bill because the balance is being struck against renters who cannot afford to pay what they are paying. As true as night follows day, the original Residential Tenancies Act that was introduced in 2004 has been amended 14 times. That means every 18 months on average the Residential Tenancies Act gets amended. I guarantee that the Minister or another Minister will be back because rents will rise to a level that the Minister and the Government will not be able to sustain. I have tabled amendment No.”
“Not one witness who came before the Oireachtas joint committee on housing said this Bill would result in rents not rising any more or rents falling, and rents need to fall. They cannot rise any more. Renters cannot pay any more and every witness who came in told us clearly that this Bill will open tenants - tens of thousands of them - to absolutely extortionate rent increases. As my colleague Deputy Boyd Barrett pointed out earlier, there is a huge issue with HAP. The HAP limits, plus the homeless HAP and the discretionary HAP top-ups, do not go anywhere near what rents actually cost at the moment. With this Bill there will be a real return to economic evictions. People will be evicted because they cannot pay the rent. The truth behind this legislation is that it is for large institutional investors and big property developers.”
“With the market reset mechanism, the average length of a tenancy being three to three and half years, and the deficit we have in student specific accommodation in Limerick, I am concerned in respect of the city I represent that renters in Limerick will be on the hook for rent increases of at least 20%. I look back to the residential tenancies amendment Act the then Minister, Simon Coveney, introduced in 2016, which introduced the RPZ regime and the 4%. Flawed and all as that mechanism is and was, at the very least, when then Deputy Coveney introduced that legislation, modelling was done. Modelling was done that was targeted at areas with the highest and fastest rising rents. With this Bill, the Minister has not done anything to look at rent predictability.”
“He comes back constantly and talks about the Housing Agency review into rent pressure zones. That review does not provide a predictable analysis as to what the effects of this Bill will be, which have been set out very well by the Deputies who spoke. I look at my city of Limerick, which the Minister of State and I both represent. We have had the highest level of rent increases in the entire country. I look at the supply issues we have and at what the Minister says about this Bill apparently incentivising supply, but the supply this Bill will incentivise, if it incentivises any, will be expensive, high-end, build-to-rent apartments. Such apartments do not get built in Limerick.”
“This Bill is a mirage because of what the Minister is talking about regarding security of tenure. There are things in the Bill about security of tenure that I would welcome were they in isolation, but we have a situation where the Government has a policy outcome whereby it has drafted a Bill that is so complicated and convoluted. It has made a policy decision that is essentially pulling in two separate directions. It claims it is trying to offer renters improved security of tenure but it is allowing landlords to reset the rent in between tenancies, which all but wipes that out. I will speak to amendments Nos. 7 and 8 in my name. I will also speak in support of amendment No. 2. My colleagues and I have all asked the Minister what modelling or analysis the Government has done in relation to this Bill.”
“We need a regulatory body and a register. We need for longer trials to have two competent interpreters. The UK has a new qualifications framework and a contract for spoken language services that was tendered in autumn 2024. We need to follow suit. It is not just me who is saying this. People who are experts in in this field are saying it because we need to develop a framework for formal accreditation and a national register for spoken language interpreters in healthcare and judicial settings. There have been examples where people have gone into hospital and people have used Google Translate. It primarily concerns migrant healthcare. There is a report with recommendations. They just need to be implemented.”
“I am disappointed by that response. The Minister of State referred to a directive of the European Parliament that compels member states to take concrete measures to ensure interpretation and translation provided meets the necessary quality standards. I have presented an example of where that did not happen. There is a line in the directive that member states must endeavour to establish registers of interpreters and translators. This is something that is best practice, which professional linguists and people such as Professor Mary Phelan in DCU have been calling for for decades. We need to move away from the concept that any bilingual person can be a competent interpreter. We need to move away from outsourcing because there is an issue with quality control. We need to have accredited, university-level courses for legal interpreters.”
“The report addressed the lack of regulation in Ireland's translation and interpreting sectors and there were a number of recommendations, including a whole-of-government approach, setting national standards, requiring specific qualifications, and establishing a central register of accredited interpreters. To date, no such centralised regulatory body or mandatory national register has been fully established across all public services. Nearly two decades after that, many of the original problems, such as the use of unqualified interpreters, persist in the legal, asylum and healthcare systems. There are examples in other jurisdictions where this has been done effectively, such as Italy and Sweden. All of the evidence and research tells us that this needs to be regulated.”
“The lack of a professional framework for spoken interpretation creates significant clinical and patient safety risks in medical settings when medical consultations rely on untrained staff or family members. There are also risks in education as schools often lack a formal policy or budget for this and frequently rely on children and friends to translate for parents. This issue has been raised for decades. In 2008, the then Minister of State with responsibility for integration, Conor Lenihan, published a report, Developing Quality, Cost Effective Interpreting and Translation Services in Ireland.”
“That means in practice that anyone who can speak two languages can work as an interpreter in the courts, healthcare settings and other public institutions. Without reliable interpreting services, language barriers can hinder everything from healthcare and education to legal processes and community integration. We need a strong legislative framework that underpins and regulates this crucial provision. It is not only necessary but fundamental to promoting equity and inclusion. We can look at the differential to Irish Sign Language because that got official recognition through the Irish Sign Language Act 2017, unlike spoken language interpreting, so there is a differential because this mandates public bodies to provide accredited ISL interpreters.”
“They also need to master legal terminology in both languages and to be familiar with regional variations of vocabulary and idioms. In addition, they require excellent short-term memory along with consecutive and whispered simultaneous interpreting skills. Further, interpreters must also be able to preserve the register used by the speaker. Interpreters also need to understand ethical principles applicable to legal and to medical interpretation. This is a specialised role that requires significant training and competence, but there is no accredited training for legal interpreters in Ireland. They are not tested to establish their competence and there is no national standards framework or professional code of ethics.”
“HM and BO, which quashed the conviction of a married couple who were convicted of female genital mutilation, as the court found evidence of inaccuracies and distortions in the interpretation of the appellant's testimony, including the mistranslation of key legal and medical terms, omission of critical information, confusion of pronouns, and distortion of questions and answers which affected the jury's ability to accurately assess the appellant's credibility and reliability. Government needs to take action to deal with the lack of training and testing of legal interpreters in this country. Interpreters should have a high level of proficiency in English and in another language. However, the ability to speak two languages is not enough.”