Paul Donnelly
Dublin West · Sinn Féin · Ireland
“It is bizarre that the State does not fund digital devices. What is the point of free school books when people have to find hundreds of euro to pay for devices? In a country that is home to most of the largest IT and social media companies in the world, surely, we must be leading the way in terms of technology in our schools.”
“I welcome the motion. The matter to which it relates is something in respect of which Sinn Féin has been campaigning consistently for many years. There is no doubt that costs are rising and putting families under severe pressure over the summer months.”
“This matter needs to be addressed. A letter from the Minister, however nicely worded, has simply not worked. We are often told that Ireland is a world leader in terms of quality educational systems. What we need is fair and equitable access to the education system for all of our children and young people.”
“What this House does in terms of regulation and ensuring the companies driving all of this do so in the proper way and are monitored, with proper due diligence done on how AI impacts society, is very important. We know AI has positive impacts but it also has extremely negative impacts.”
“I met with the parents of Grace Lynch. I commend them on their advocacy on road safety and tackling scramblers and illegal e-bikes and scooters. On Monday, hundreds of residents in Hartstown marched around Hartstown Park to highlight the issue of antisocial behaviour, scramblers and illegal e-bikes in the parks.”
“I welcome the Bill and the opportunity to speak on it. It is critically important. AI is something we use every single day, whether we know it or not. Many of the applications we use have a major component of AI. In many areas it has a really useful purpose. Students and workers use it, and people in here use it on a daily basis.”
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“When we talk about value for money, the Departments that scrutinise community projects should learn from them and share with those who are wasting millions of euro the experience of how community projects are well-run on a shoestring, providing genuine value for money. Today, many TDs will raise the issue of the money that has been spent but I want to look at an issue brought up by An Taisce with regard to MetroLink and the Tara Street section of that project. The Markievicz leisure centre, located close to here, is home to the only remaining swimming pool in the south inner city. An apartment block named College Gate will also be demolished during this project. Reports have estimated it will cost up to €60 million extra to buy and demolish those apartments and relocate their occupants.”
“Other Deputies have outlined the level of waste of public money on various projects, such as the national children's hospital, the Dáil printer that did not fit into a room, the art scanner that was bought for €125,000 without anyone thinking about where to put it, the bike shelter, the security hut and so on. The list of these projects goes on. What drives people mad is that there are local projects desperately looking for funding to stay open or enhance their services. Last week I raised the issue of the Blanchardstown Centre for Independent Living. Its funding has increased by just €2,000 since 2018 despite the number of people looked after there trebling. The Genesis counselling service could provide an extra 4,000 hours of counselling in Dublin 15 for €200,000. Imagine that. That is value for money in my eyes.”
“Anybody who goes to Dublin West will see there are hundreds of homes being built and thousands planned, yet we still have a massive gap in numbers. I have two other issues to bring up. Every week we all call for the community to support the Garda. The essence of the support is also reciprocal, in that we need the Garda to support the community. The community safety projects are really important, but they need to be genuine and something that is collaborative between the communities so it is not just gardaí and the community but also the local authority, local youth services and all those who help deal with the core issues of crime in our communities, that is, poverty, disadvantage and all the issues we know about which create crime in the first place.”
“I express my deep shock at the attack on a child in Finglas today. I understand the child is very ill and I wish them a speedy recovery. It is clear our communities do not feel safe. They know there is a dearth of gardaí on our streets. I acknowledge the brilliant work gardaí are doing on the ground in Dublin West under extremely difficult circumstances, especially in the last couple of weeks and the last year when there have been a significant number of gangland attacks. I have highlighted the fact other areas, such as Limerick, for example, which have populations similar to Dublin West have significantly more gardaí and Garda stations. It also notable that Dublin West is continuing to grow at an exponential rate with thousands of new homes being built in Ongar, Castleknock, Clonsilla, Tyrellstown, the Phoenix Park and Ashtown.”
“It is such a disgrace we do not have more time - we have just a couple of hours - for such a document. We cannot leave the housing sector to the private market because we know where that has left us.”
“When the planning application was put forward we discovered the council had been engaging in pre-planning with the developer for two years while the community was treated like mushrooms and kept in the dark. The community then had the statutory few weeks to assess the planning application and put in submissions with absolutely no help or funding, no meetings with planners, and because it was a live application councillors and TDs are not allowed, by law, to even talk about it. Can the Minister see how unfair this is on local communities? I will bring that recommendation further and request that funding is provided to local communities to allow them to realistically put comprehensive submissions in for such massive developments. There are a huge number of recommendations and unfortunately we only have a couple of minutes each.”
“A three-bedroom, mid-terrace house starts at half a million euro. A four-bedroom, semi-detached home costs close to €800,000. How can our young people afford to stay at home, or to come home? Another recommendation was promoting earlier and more effective participation by the public in the planning system. The planning system is constantly under attack and it is not under attack to make it fairer and more effective in terms of public consultation, it is under attack to make it easier for developers to get planning through. I will give an example of how the current planning system works. There is a development in Blanchardstown Shopping Centre in Dublin 15 that is a 16-storey building proposed by Goldman Sachs - not a small developer or one short of funds in any shape or form.”
“The Government needs to be honest about the number of housing units being built each year. It was very clear during the general election campaign that both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael clearly told untruths about the number of housing units that would be build in 2024 by many thousands. It is clear the information was at hand and directly contradicted the figure of 40,000. Section two talks about the economic and social impacts of housing and we can see the damage caused by Government’s continued failure to address the housing crisis. We are losing highly qualified and professional people to the rest of the world. We need them to stay at home, and those who have left home to be able to come back to Ireland. I will give an example. There is a new development called Luttrellstown Gate – a lovely name - in Clonsilla.”
“Sinn Féin calls for a sustainable, permanent and just outcome to the war through a negotiated peace settlement. It is clear that many Ukrainian people here in Ireland want to return home to a stable and peaceful country. We are all united in this desire for a sustainable and just peace. The message to Trump and Putin and their regimes must be clear. Any new negotiations regarding the future of Ukraine can only take place with Ukraine at the table. Nothing can be decided about Ukraine, without Ukraine. Ireland is militarily neutral. However, we are not politically neutral. Ireland can send out a very powerful message that peace with justice is the only pathway forward for the people of Ukraine and indeed also the ordinary people of Russia.”
“Unfortunately, there is a lot of hypocrisy on the Government side when Members rightly talk about Russia and Russian leaders being sanctioned while, at the same time, there is utter silence about sanctions on Israel for the exact same actions that are being carried out by the Israelis. I call for a co-ordinated and concerted effort by the international community to secure an end to the hostilities and build peace. The Irish people have opened their hearts and homes to tens of thousands of Ukrainian people in the wake of the Russian invasion. Irish people know about invasion. We know occupation and we know all about partition. Our country is still partitioned over 100 years since the liberation of 26 of our 32 counties. All wars end and this war should end today.”
“We all remember with disbelief the morning we saw on our screens the invasion and attacks on Ukraine by Russian forces ordered by Putin and his regime in Moscow. There has been massive suffering and hardship and an enormous number of civilian and military deaths on both sides. It is heartbreaking to see the constant stream of videos. It is as if we are watching video games of drones chasing people down and killing them. It is absolutely horrific. Similar to Gaza and the occupied territories in the West Bank and Palestine, there have been hundreds, if not thousands, of targeted attacks on civilian infrastructure, including electricity plants, healthcare and educational facilities, colleges and homes. Similar to Gaza, these amount to war crimes.”
“I urge the Minister of State to recognise that we need to get a grip on this situation. The reality is that women are dying and children are being left in traumatic circumstances. They need help and support now.”
“It means that people were unable to get the help and support they needed to get out of a domestic violence situation. The number of calls made in the Dublin metropolitan region, DMR, western division, which covers the Dublin 15 area, increased in 2023 from 5,458 to 6,025. Women's Aid has said that at least one in four women in Ireland is subject to some form of abuse from a current or former partner. Violence against women continues to rise, yet there remains no clear, effective response forthcoming from the Government to address the issues of the shortage of places and supports for women caught up in these circumstances and unable to leave. We deal with these cases daily. People are coming to our constituency offices and, I am sure, the constituency offices of Government Deputies, terrified and afraid for themselves and their children.”
“I also thank Deputy Coppinger for bringing forward this motion. From 2020 to 2024, 62 women North and South on the island of Ireland were killed by their abusers. As a society and a State, we must do better in terms of tackling gender-based violence. It requires investment in services, including the provision of adequate refuge places in every county. It means ensuring our laws are fit for purpose, including dealing with the new challenges created by social media and technology. In 2024, the Sonas domestic violence charity in my area, in Dublin 15, helped 631 women and 661 children in the refuge, transitional housing, safe homes and community outreach. However, 368 women were unable to be accommodated by Sonas in 2024. That is a shocking number.”
“We all know the positives of social media, which include the connections that people make. However, we also know the dangers of social media and the harm it is causing, particularly to the mental health of our younger generation. I will touch on the impact on the environment, as Deputy Ó Laoghaire mentioned. The processing of data is very resource-intensive. I will give the House two statistics. Each MWh of energy requires the consumption of 7,100 l of water. A simple request for a 100-word email generated by an AI chatbot using GPT-4 requires 0.14 kWh of electricity. That is equal to the electricity required to light 14 LED lightbulbs for one hour. That is for a 100-word email. AI is important. It is coming; in fact, it is here. It is something we need to regulate. We must look after our society.”
“Things are starting to present themselves that have not previously been considered because they did not need to be considered. [...] It is difficult to legislate for something that is so difficult to even define. We need to move rapidly. Even the speed at which we are moving at a European level is not sufficient. The boundaries around this technology are not governed by political or geographic barriers. In an interview with The Irish Times in February last year, Dr. Patricia Scanlon said: We all admit how powerful this technology is and anything that powerful needs to be regulated. I think anybody arguing against that doesn't really have very strong legs to stand on because the "it's for the benefit of society" argument and that "trust us" attitude didn't really work very well with social media.”
“How can we ensure nobody is left behind and preserve freedoms in the AI revolution? How can we ensure that uses of artificial intelligence respect our humanist values and the technology serves society and the public interest? The simplest and soundest answer I came up with was regulation, regulation, regulation. Professor Gregory O'Hare is a professor of AI and the head of the school of computer science and statistics in Trinity College Dublin, TCD. He has acknowledged the difficulty of legislating for such a vast evolving area. He said at a meeting of the Joint Committee on Enterprise, Trade and Employment: I do not think the legislative framework we have at the moment is in a position to be able to respond with the speed that we need.”
“These are the things we have to consider and we must be careful when we look at technology like this. In recent years, there has been a movement to address AI through various policy initiatives and regulation in different jurisdictions, including in Ireland. Significantly, there has been an important move towards regulating AI within the European Union in the form of the EU AI Act, which entered into force on 1 August 2024. The precise impact of this Act on AI in Ireland remains to be seen but, as a binding regulation, the EU AI Act will have important implications for Ireland as it will shape our country's approach to AI in the future. Today, I came across the following three questions that I think are important. How can we massively develop artificial intelligence technologies and uses across the world?”
“In business, the list of opportunities for AI will be endless. Its use in shops, manufacturing, sales, insurance, finance and law is happening as we speak. Like all developing technology, it also poses a number of risks. We simply do not know all the risks at this stage, however, we can be fairly sure that jobs that are here now will be gone. They will be consigned to the history books like those of the coopers about whom we now sing who used to work in Guinness and other breweries. Their jobs have now been consigned to history. I am originally from the north inner city, an area that was destroyed by containerisation. Thousands of jobs were destroyed overnight. That led to decades of mass unemployment, poverty and deprivation, and into the heroin epidemic of the 1980s.”
“There is no doubt that AI is developing at a rapid pace and the technology has the potential to change the way we live, engage with each other, work and play. AI will affect different facets of our lives and has the potential to bring a number of benefits. I have seen programmes about how AI has improved the speed of the development of new medicines saving lives and costing less in development. Other areas include life-saving technology such as vehicle and airline safety. AI is found in most of our electrical household items. People are using AI in so many positive ways. Students, teachers, academics and even we as public representatives are using it on a regular basis outside the technology we have in Leinster House. No, I did not use it to write this speech. I did it myself through old-fashioned research.”
“There are landlords out there who want to keep their tenants in their properties and they want to sell them to the local authorities but it is caught up in so much red tape and so many delays that it is extremely difficult for them to hold on so they are pulling out of the scheme and going onto the private market. That is on this Government's head. I urge the Government to get its act together, get the targets, give them to the local authorities and let them get on with the job of keeping people in their homes.”
“There was a scheme - Deputy Ó Broin brought this up - which is the tenant in situ scheme. It is a good scheme and it has helped people to stay out of homelessness. What we are getting now into our offices and the local authorities are telling us for the past number of weeks is that they cannot progress any more in the tenant in situ scheme because the Government has failed to give them the targets for 2025. That is the reason people are going into homelessness. It is because the Government has not given the local authorities the targets to be able to move forward with them. The restrictions on the tenant in situ scheme make it really difficult for local authorities to engage with people who are willing to sell.”
“I guarantee that right across every single constituency, probably even including the Minister of State’s, people are coming asking for help and asking what we can do. When will the Government ever accept that its housing strategy has failed? Until it accepts it, this is what will happen every day. Families and individuals - human beings - will be forced into homelessness. What does that look like in Dublin 15? There is one homeless hub in Dublin 15 that has only recently come on stream. Where else do they go? They go to Clondalkin. They go to town. They go to Swords, Santry and all over the city. Where do their children go to school? They are still in the same place and they are forced to come back into the area every day, hang around and then go back again. That is the failure. That is what failure looks like.”
“I thank the Social Democrats for bringing forward this motion on the housing crisis. What does a housing crisis look like? Take my clinic in this week alone. On Monday morning, I had a single man who is working. He is living with his family and has nowhere to live. A family that is 12 years on the list has received a notice to quit and will be homeless in months. A family that is five years on the list and has absolutely no chance of getting social housing has received a notice to quit and will be homeless by the summer. A family that is 11 years on the list has received a notice to quit. This is what it looks like. That is what a housing crisis looks like. That is just my office.”
“I urge the Minister to collaborate with the Minister for Justice. They should sit down and figure out how we do this. I also urge him to go online and have a look at what they are doing in England because in England and Wales they have dedicated scrambler units in many towns and cities that are also affected by the same scourge of people driving recklessly on the roads. People are being killed every single year. Some residents are terrified of driving, cycling or walking around their community because of these activities. The Minister should have a chat with the Minister for Justice and urge him to please give the Garda the resources they need to tackle this problem.”
“The problem is that the Garda do not have the resources to be able to do that. It is something that must be challenged. We see them driving on one wheel, on the wrong side of the road, and with no helmet and no safety equipment. While I welcome the introduction of the instruction, it is pointless without the front-line gardaí getting the appropriate training and equipment, including high-powered motorbikes to be able to challenge those people on the streets because they just cannot do it in the cars. It is impossible for them to do it. It is like giving the Garda responsibility for tackling drink and drug driving but not giving them the equipment to carry out the tests. We are asking them to challenge the people on quad bikes and scramblers but they do not have the equipment to do that.”
“I send my condolences to Councillor Tania Doyle and Hazel, and also colleagues here in the Oireachtas, on the tragic death of Derek just before Christmas. He was on his way home from this House. The Minister referred in his introduction to scramblers and quad bikes on our streets, parks and open spaces. I welcome the instruction that has been given by senior gardaí to begin to challenge people driving scramblers and quad bikes in our communities. I am sure the Minister has seen the countless videos that are put up on social media by young people of themselves on scramblers and quad bikes on our streets. They are goading the gardaí. They are so brazen now that they driving right beside them. They goad them and knock on the windows of their cars. They are challenging the gardaí to chase them.”
“I raise Blanchardstown Centre for Independent Living. There are many laudable references to disability services in the programme for Government. In 2018, Blanchardstown Centre for Independent Living provided a home support service for 36 people and in 2024, the number had increased to 150. A total of 33 people availed of its transport services in 2018 but that number has increased to 302. In maintenance, 21 people availed of its services in 2018 and in 2024, it was 40 people. In 2018, the HSE provided €72,208 in funding and in 2024, it provided €74,232. There has been a massive increase in the numbers of people availing of the service - in fact, they are being referred by the HSE itself to this service in Dublin 15 – yet there has only been an increase in funding of €2,000 in those six years. This must be examined.”
“This is something that happens on a regular basis. They have been continually asked to add on to the schools, including adding on special classes. Unfortunately the capacity of the electricity system is not able to take it. They have applied for planning permission but there is a hold-up. The programme for Government speaks about educational facilities and how children should be educated in first-class and world-class facilities. It is time for this to be done. As I have said, I have looked at the previous programme for Government and this programme for Government and both say the same things. I hope I am not here in five years' time with the same story.”
“It has made an emergency application for the roof, which was repaired in 2016 but has failed, primarily because it is such an old building that it needs to be completely replaced. I have written to the Minister to ask her to have a look at this urgently for the school. It was built in 1974 and needs to be replaced. It is entirely inappropriate for children in this day and age to be educated in a school such as this. The other school campus I want to mention is on the Navan Road and includes St. John Bosco junior and senior boys' national schools and Mary, Help of Christians girls' national school. They are due for replacement. A lot of work has been done by the schools. While I was visiting one of the schools just before the election, as we sat there the electricity went off in all three schools.”
“I will speak about the education section of the programme for Government and particularly educational buildings and facilities. I had a look at the previous programme for Government from which this one has virtually been cut and pasted. I will reference two schools in my constituency. One is Coolmine Community School. Recently I visited it when it was raining and had to dodge the buckets catching the rain. There were nine buckets in the main hall as we walked through the building. There are leaks in classrooms where children are moved from one side of the classroom to the other. There is mould on the walls. The children were wearing their jackets in the classrooms because the Portakabins are so old that they are freezing. The school was built in 1974.”
“Most of the world stood by and watched genocide take place in Gaza. Even today the world stands by as the brutal Israeli military machine attacks the West Bank. I watched a video last night showing dozens of bombs going off simultaneously in the Jenin camp which is as heavily built up as Gaza is. I do not know how many people were killed in those attacks last night and we probably never will know. We will never know the number of people who have been killed in Gaza because many of them are still buried beneath that rubble. How bizarre that the State can turn a blind eye and trade with a state that is before the International Criminal Court for genocide while at the same time joining in that case.”
“Untruth, mistruth, whatever way we want to word it. We all know exactly what we are talking about here. The comments overnight by the American President have shocked the entire world - the horror of a world leader openly talking about ethnic cleansing a whole population for his developer friends in the US and Israel should be a line in the sand for the other world leaders, including those in this Government. The EU acted decisively when Ukraine was attacked and occupied by Putin and Russia. It is now time to use those same arguments and logic to act against the Israeli apartheid regime. In this Parliament, we have had a Ukrainian flag from the very day that Ukraine was occupied. Where is the Palestinian flag? Where is the support for the Palestinian people shown clearly in this Parliament?”
“Sadly, the Government could have progressed the occupied territories Bill in the last seven years. Now it suddenly decides that we now have to look at it again and we have to reword it. I call it out for what it is.”
“Land is being robed every single day by the Zionists and supported by the Israeli Government and Israeli army. Just as with its housing targets, the Government has also lied to the people about its intention to progress this Bill. Let us call this Government's election promise what it is: a lie.”
“I would like to thank the hundreds and thousands of Irish people who have marched through the streets of the Thirty-two Counties of Ireland in support of the Palestinian people. The occupied territories legislation would ban all trade, including services, with Israeli illegal settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories and in east Jerusalem. It would send a clear message to the apartheid and genocidal regime that there are real consequences for its murderous slaughter of tens of thousands of men, women and children and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their lands and their homes, and the stealing of their homes and land on a daily basis. We are not just talking about the stealing of land in 1947; we are talking about land being stolen as we stand here today.”