Paul Murphy
Dublin South-West · People Before Profit-Solidarity · Ireland
“The Minister of State assured us we are bound by international law but then went on to talk about the fact that he wants to deploy troops outside the framework of international law. That is why the Government is getting rid of the triple lock. All the triple lock does is ensure that we only can send troops in line with international law.”
“The case for MetroLink south west is extremely strong. There are 350,000 people living between the Luas red and green lines. That is who will be served by this.”
“Hopefully the junior Minister will be able to clarify. The Minister, Deputy McEntee, said earlier to Deputy Ó Laoghaire, "The people I speak to do not like the fact that Russia has essentially removed, or will remove in the coming months, all our peacekeeping troops from UNIFIL".”
“I, too, want to ask about the senior Minister. This came up at the Dáil reform committee last week. It is very peculiar that a senior Minister is here and has answered previous questions on the triple lock today and then – no offence meant - we have the junior Minister answering these questions, which precisely prevents the continuation o…”
“Its defence is that we should not worry because the Government is only going to send them as part of an international force. I do not think anyone here thinks the Government is going to invade a country all by itself.”
“It is there in black and white in the programme for Government and the Government needs to live up to its commitment to do a new, properly independent feasibility study. I appeal to the Minister of State to ask the Minister for Transport to meet with the metro south west group which has been doing such excellent campaigning on this issue.”
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“I will ask the Tánaiste about Connor Green, the surgeon responsible for inserting non-medical springs into children at Temple Street. He is also the subject of the Nayagam report, which recommended that two thirds of the children it looked at have a follow-up clinical review. I understand that he is seeking an injunction to prevent the publication of the Nayagam report. Is the State contesting that and seeking to publish the report? Why is the look-back review, which flows from the Nayagam report, excluding adult patients? Dr. Green had a substantial adult practice and very many of them have had significant complications, including at least one person who has been in touch me. He has a licence to practice in Maryland.”
“That is fine, the Minister will vote against it today and vote it down. However, I would say the argumentation does not hold water. That it is referenced elsewhere suggests that someone somewhere recognised the need to reference it, and it needs to be referenced in relation to this part as well.”
“The Minister is not going to accept it today on Committee Stage. As part of the Minister's consideration, I ask him to consider that he cannot logically say that we do not need it because it is already binding on us because of Article 23 itself, and then on the other hand say it is here in relation to this particular part. The fact that it is there in relation to the Eurodac regulation and screening illustrates that it is there. Someone decided there is a need for it to be there in order for that to apply. Yet, as it stands, when we finish Committee Stage it is not going to be there in the part that relates to asylum procedures. Does Deputy O'Callaghan really want to be the Minister who says that the best interests of the child and guarantees for minors are not going to be referenced in terms of how we are carrying out asylum procedures?”
“One is because it is already a legal obligation so what is the point in doing it and the other is that it is already there in a different Part. He read it out himself. It is in the Part relating to Eurodac and screening. The Bill states explicitly that the best interests of the child should be a primary consideration in the carrying out of the procedures under that Part. We are asking him to state it in relation to the asylum process and he is not going to accept it.”
“The Minister's response is quite revealing. We are saying this is a Bill for the detention of children. He is saying not to worry, he will recognise the rights of children and there is nothing to be worried about. Then we have amendments before us that propose the best interests of the child should be a primary consideration in the carrying out of this procedure in terms of asylum, and we have amendments that propose this Part will be interpreted in line with the guarantees for minors set out in Article 23, but the Minister is here to tell us he cannot accept them. The most substantive reason he gave for not being able to accept them is that he says the provision is already there. The Minister knows it is not already there because he has just read it out. It is there in a different Part. He asserted two reasons he cannot do it.”
“It is a bit contradictory because the Minister is saying he is happy to sit for eight hours today and sit for eight hours next week as well but unless the Minister will introduce a guillotine, we could be doing this at the committee. I have heard from the Cathaoirleach of the committee that it was willing to sit at short notice and for as long as necessary. Why not have the proper parliamentary process? Why not go through Committee Stage in committee and afterwards do Report Stage of the Bill? At the very least as a parliament, it is what should be incumbent on us. It certainly should be incumbent on the Government when making such a serious move to actually go through the processes as they are set out as opposed to try to skip them or partially avoid them in the way that is happening here.”
“This is a very important Bill which has widespread ramifications for everybody in this country in reality, if not directly but indirectly in terms of where we go from here once you normalise the idea of detaining children and once you normalise the idea of diminishing the right to legal representation. It is very troubling that such a serious move will be done not just without proper parliamentary scrutiny but in conscious disregard of proper parliamentary scrutiny. I am interested in the Minister's explanation as to why this is not happening in a normal committee. I am not on the committee but the committee is absolutely the place to have the kind of in-depth discussion that is needed on all of these amendments that we had such rushed deadlines to submit.”
“This is an incredibly serious piece of legislation. It is a frontal assault on human rights. It is a Bill for the detention of children. It is a Bill which undermines the right to legal representation. It is a Bill which attempts to effectively telescope the process of asylum in order to deny asylum seekers their rights. I do not think that such an assault on human rights will stay with one group, in that the implementation of this denial of human rights for asylum seekers, as part of a scape-goating strategy, will not then have an impact on other groups in society.”
“Will the Taoiseach ask the Minister for Health to meet with these workers and instruct the HSE to treat them properly, give them pay parity and treat them as section 39 workers?”
“There are about 20 Northside Home Care healthcare assistants in the Gallery. These workers are on strike today. Some of them have worked for 25 years and are only paid €15.04 an hour. Others are on minimum wage. They get approximately 30% less than others doing the same job. They provide vital care for about 500 people on a daily basis. The reason for this ultimately is the HSE has arbitrarily excluded them from being treated as section 39 workers. When this was raised with the Taoiseach when they were on strike in January, he said he would "talk to the Minister and the HSE, to see if the issue can be satisfactorily resolved, averting any necessity for further industrial action". Yet here we are, back again.”
“More remote working would mean fewer kids with asthma and fewer older people suffering from COPD. It would be a win-win for almost everyone, apart from the David Brents and Denis O'Briens of the world who want all of their worker drones back in the office where they can keep a close eye on them and restrict any space for autonomy. Billionaire Denis O'Brien says that remote working was a mistake. He is a tax exile swanning around on a superyacht. We need a Government that puts workers' rights first.”
“If an employer refuses a request unreasonably, one option in the Bill is to resolve the dispute by getting the employer to pay one month's wages in compensation. One month's wages for someone spending the rest of their working life at that company is not a lot when commuting in heavy traffic for hours every day and only seeing their kids for a few minutes before they go to bed is the reality for so many working families today and is completely unnecessary. The right to remote working should be made part of the Government's obligations to cut emissions by half by 2030 under the climate Act. We had an excellent briefing yesterday by the Climate and Health Alliance, which spoke about how important it is for people's health to cut down on air pollution from traffic.”
“He actually misled the committee at that time by claiming that the right of appeal to the WRC was not intended to be a solely procedural right and that a reason for refusal must be valid. He said that it would not be a case of an employer just ticking a box and saying "No", but that is precisely what the legislation provides for. It is precisely what has happened and Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael knew this at the time. The Labour Party's Bill would much improve the situation because it would give workers the right to work remotely where reasonably practicable and it sets out only limited grounds for refusal. That is what workers need. I would still argue that the Bill has too many concessions to employers.”
“I thank Deputy Lawlor for tabling the Bill, which would represent significant improvements on the current situation whereby workers have no right at all to remote working. What Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael legislated for was a right for employers to refuse reasonable remote working requests. I was on the enterprise committee at the time when the Government Bill went through. ICTU came in and told us the Government's law was utterly pointless. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael knew exactly what they were doing in bringing in totally pointless legislation that was effectively written by IBEC. The responsible Minister at that time was Leo Varadkar. He is now going around portraying himself as a kind of progressive champion of workers' rights and other causes but that is not what he did when he was in office.”
“All of that is to satisfy the big tech corporations. It is time to stop and it is time listen to the likes of the Friends of the Earth and provide an energy guarantee scheme and it is time for people to be on the streets on 28 February with the Affordable Ireland Campaign.”
“The energy transition is not happening, is it? A total of 80% of our energy comes from fossil fuels. It is not because ordinary people are not making efforts to make changes in their lives, put on solar panels and retrofit their houses and so on. The central reason is that data centre usage of electricity has ballooned by more than 400% in the past ten years and it is on a trajectory to rise even faster. Even though renewable capacity is being added to the grid, all of that is being swallowed up by big tech. That is not just a problem for our climate. It is causing ordinary people's bills to go higher and higher. It is adding to the cost-of-living crisis. This year, people's electricity bills will 10% higher than they were last year. Almost 300,000 people are in arrears on their electricity bills.”
“Does the Taoiseach accept that his Government is failing the people of this country in the most profound way by bowing down to big tech corporations and the fossil fuel industry and putting their interests before the needs of our people? It is encapsulated by the strategic gas emergency reserve Bill, which is going to entrench reliance on the dirtiest fossil fuel on the earth - dirtier than coal. The Government is watering down commitments of the climate Act in the Bill to say that they should obey this Act to the extent that they consider practicable. The Taoiseach must reverse course on this.”
“For years, we have been told that the Government's climate targets are legally binding, and the implication was that, therefore, heaven and earth would be moved in order to meet those targets. Then, in January, we heard from the Minister, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, that the Government is not going to meet the targets, and it did not announce any measures or have any plan to announce any measures to actually close the gap and meet those targets. The contrast between what the Taoiseach said when he went to COP 30 in Brazil and then the reality of what the Government is doing on the ground could not be more stark. Temperatures are rising, and the clock is ticking. If we are not prepared to tell our citizens the truth about this, we are failing them and this planet in the most profound way.”
“If she does, she will see that there is space there to construct a second building and that there would be no need to decant students from one to the other. There is enough space for a new building. There is a growing population in the area, which is adjacent to City West and so on.”
“I want to stress the point about St. Aidan's in Brookfield. A previous Minister visited the school and agreed that the building is simply not suitable. It dates from the 1980s. There was an article in The Irish Times about it that contained a series of pictures that I took when I visited the school previously. If the Minister visits the school, she will see that the building is not acceptable. There is a kind of penny-wise-and-pound-foolish approach to these emergency works to patch up roofs that just cannot be patched up and that are continually affected by leaks. The facade of the building is broken down and crumbling. It is damp and paint will not adhere to it. There is just problem after problem. The building is no longer suitable. I invite the Minister to come to the school to meet with the staff and the wonderful students there.”
“It has amazing staff and amazing students but the building is in a horrendous state. A new building is needed. The school has spent millions on emergency works just to keep the existing building patched together, but it has not dealt with the leaks in the roof and the white stuff coming out of the windows. It is not possible to the windows because the grilles on the outside have become corroded and are stuck to the frames. I will come back on this. The school desperately needs a new building.”
“Could the Minister respond to the suggestion that has come from Government backbenchers that, effectively, there is some parish-pump parochialism going on in terms of the inclusion of certain schools in these tranches? There are ten projects in Galway, which has 5% of the population of the country, compared with 22 in Dublin - approximately 21% of the projects - where in the region of 27% of the population lives. The Minister might want to take the opportunity to respond to that suggestion, which, I again stress, is coming from Government backbenchers. There is nothing in Tallaght, although there are plenty of schools there that are in desperate need. I want to highlight the case of one. I have spoken about this over a number of years in the Dáil. St. Aidan's in Brookfield is an amazing school.”
“I want to ask about the school building and refurbishment projects in Dublin 24 that are included in the national development plan, NDP, sectoral investment plan. As far as I know, there are 105 projects listed for the tranche for 2026 and 2027. Only one of those is in Dublin 24 and there are zero in Tallaght despite plenty of schools having a very desperate need. I know Government backbenchers are giving out about the number of projects in Galway. Ten of the projects are in Galway, which is 10% of the projects, when Galway only has 5% of the population.”
“When it is speaking to the public, it adds onto that the idea that it will close the viability gap, which is this new term that has entered politics just in the last year or so and has become the thing to dress up how the Government wants to make developers and institutional investors have even more profits than they currently have. Our starting point is instead what will resolve the housing crisis. What will mean the basic thing of people being able to access affordable, quality, decent housing? It should not be too much to ask in one of the richest countries in the world in 2026, but if one starts from that standpoint, one comes up with a Bill that points in the opposite direction to what the Government is doing in the main with this Bill and comes up with things like the amendments that we are debating today.”
“The other part of the Government strategy is to suggest that there is no alternative and that nobody has any policies. We can do whatever we want about policies, such as writing books, but we will still hear the Government say that these people have no ideas. The Government says it day in, day out on social media clips just to create the idea that there is no alternative. "There is no alternative" is the mantra that is pushed on people. It is incumbent on us to get the message across that there is an alternative and it starts from the opposite point of view. The Government starts from the point of view of what will make landlords and developers happy.”
“Effectively the Government's approach to the housing crisis is to do the same. It is to get people to accept as normal that we will hit 20,000 people in emergency accommodation and that we will go beyond that, and to accept that rents will increase even faster, to €3,000 or more, as a consequence of this Bill - that is just the way it is. Some elements of the Government, backed up by some toxic parts of politics, are playing a dirty game of blaming not those at the top but the most vulnerable people in our society, suggesting that asylum seekers are adding to people in emergency accommodation or whatever. Not only is this stuff factually inaccurate, but it is a dirty trick designed to distract attention away from Fianna Fáil, from Fine Gael and from those who benefit from the housing crisis.”
“It is just not very serious for the Minister to say he has not heard any alternative proposals when we are literally debating amendments which have alternative proposals. The Government's approach on this issue is horrendously cynical. One part of it is to try to normalise the housing crisis and make it like the health crisis, which every opinion poll turns up as a significant issue. When asked what a big issue is for them, people say the health crisis. The Government has normalised the idea that it is such a big crisis and it is a black hole which money can be thrown at, but it can never really be resolved, to try to neuter it as a political issue. Successive Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael Governments have done that reasonably effectively on the issue of the health crisis.”
“He might not agree with what is being put forward but it is clear that the amendments, like our amendments, contain alternative proposals. He might not think the proposals will work but they are clearly alternatives. Alternative positions have been raised repeatedly in the course of the debate, calling for a ban on economic evictions, which we know works. We know it does not stop homelessness or people entering homelessness, but we know that it significantly slows it down. We know that because we have done it, and when we get rid of it, the speed of people entering homelessness goes up faster. We have said we want real rent controls which reduce rents to affordable levels and we have pointed to the need for State investment and a State construction company to build social and affordable homes.”
“That is effectively what the Government says its position is: that there will be pain in the short term and rents will rise for people, but the investment will come in and in the long run we will have a better housing market. It is effectively what the Government has been doing for the last ten years, though not at the scale or speed of increases that the Government is now introducing. The result is the misery that the Minister admits has been created. The Minister's point about social media clips was ironic. The Government says things all the time for social media clips and it is pushed out, just to say it so many times that people think there must be something to it. The Minister said that the Opposition has not put forward any proposals or alternatives. I do not know how he can say it. He has been listening to us.”
“That is the consequence of those housing policies. One follows the other. Some people have got very rich in the meantime from that. It is a massive transfer of wealth from the many to the few. What is different about this Government, this housing policy and what is in the Bill? This is just supercharging the policies we have had up until now. It is going in the same direction that has got us to this point but just going faster. It is all this trickle-down idea that if we invite in these people and make it clear to them that they can make loads of money, and that if we give a windfall of €20 million to IRES REIT, it will invest more money because it thinks it will be able to make more profits, and then, in the long run, rents will come down.”
“It has involved incentivising landlords and developers to come into the market and making sure they can make as much profit as they need to make. That is the essence of the approach of the Government and what has got us to the point of housing misery. I always make the point that I remember in the 2016 general election campaign that homelessness and the housing crisis were emerging as a significant issue. By that stage, we had fewer than 5,000 people homeless. Later on, it was said that when we reached 10,000, that would be a breaking point and that people would not stand going over 10,000. In the 2020 general election, we were over 10,000. By the 2024 general election, we were well over 15,000, and now we are on a trajectory to 20,000, which will be met rapidly if the Government gets its way and manages to implement this approach.”
“A system of misery has been widely created in the housing system, affecting many people. How did we get here? Shall we have a look at how we got here? If the Government accepts that we have a situation of misery and the Opposition says we have a situation of misery, how did we get here? We got here with Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, but the key point in a way is not that those parties that are responsible for it, but that the policies pursued by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael got us to this point. I have been listening to the debate and the policies that were pursued have been set out in great detail. They involved a move away from the delivery of social housing at any scale. There has been an increase in recent years but there has almost been a complete collapse. The policy has been that the market will provide.”
“There would be no ramming it through if the Minister had brought in the legislation in September or October, if we had debated it and so on. The Minister is absolutely ramming it through. That the Minister announced it a long time ago and did not bring forward the legislation so it could be scrutinised and amended precisely proves the point about him ramming it through rather than disproving it. It is interesting that the Minister admits that we currently have a situation of misery. He admits that but says that his Bill is a way to avoid making that misery permanent. I will take the first part of that first of all. We currently have a situation of misery for renters, for people who are trying to buy their homes, for homeless people, and for half a million young people trapped at home.”
“I will briefly respond to some of what the Minister said, though first I will note that we can see the impact of the guillotine. We are still on the first amendment and we are going to run out of debating time relatively soon. When the Minister made the point that the Government is not ramming it through, his excuse for how it is not ramming it through is because it announced the legislation last year, in August, but that is precisely the point. He announced the policy proposal last year, which is fine, and absolutely his right, but we are debating it, having voted on Second Stage just a few hours ago, and will do Committee and Remaining Stages in five hours. It will be guillotined three weeks out from this being implemented. That is ramming it through.”
“That is the sensible thing to do, if you were not governed by the class interest of representing landlords and the free market ideology that goes alongside that.”
“If you start from the point of view of not representing landlords but, instead, of representing the majority of people who are affected by the housing crisis, you would go about this in a very different way by establishing a board to reset rents to affordable levels and where the guideline for establishing affordability would be rents that are, in general, no more than 20% of a tenant's income. That is the alternative way to tackle the housing crisis. It says let us stop pouring public money into the pockets of private landlords and developers. Let us stop pouring and enabling more and more private renters' money to be funnelled into the hands of landlords. Instead, let us protect tenants. Let us ban economic evictions. Let us control rents and use public money to have a State construction company to build social and affordable homes.”
“The Opposition is mostly united in this House - the left Opposition, certainly - in opposing what the Government is doing here, but I call on all the left parties to take a stand on the councils against these council rent increases. Even if they have voted in some cases to allow these to go ahead, they should reconsider it, particularly in light of what is happening here and the extra pressure that it is going to apply in terms of HAP tenants. What our amendment seeks to do is show an image of how you could do things fundamentally differently.”
“Reading the Government's latest housing plan, it explicitly talks about merging council rents and cost rental over time, in other words, doing away with the differential rent system and the basic and fair idea that the amount people pay for housing should be based on their income. It is bad enough that it is going to result in massive increases for council tenants, but HAP tenants are going to be doubly hit. HAP tenants are going to be faced with significant increases - let us say, 30% increases in what they are paying to the council - and then they are going to be hit by this increase which, if the HAP limits do not increase, all of which will be gobbled up in the top-ups that they are paying. They are the worst affected and they are some of the most vulnerable people in the housing market as a whole.”
“The other point in relation to that is many HAP tenants across the country will effectively have a double rent increase. Councils across the country are hiking council rents. Dublin City Council, for example, has voted to do so and is due to implement the hike from April. Galway City Council has done it and other councils across the country have done it too. It looks like South Dublin County is trying to go for significant increases. It is to be voted on towards the end of this year to come into effect next year. This is a nationwide process. It is being driven by council management, but it is also being driven by the Government.”
“Independent Ireland's Gillian O'Toole literally got the same email that the rest of us got from the Irish Property Owners Association, IPOA, the landlords' lobby organisation, that asked us to put in these amendments on behalf of landlords. Independent Ireland said: "Yes, sir. We represent the landlords. We will submit the amendments." It is very blatant. Do not let anyone fall for the idea that Independent Ireland represents the common man or woman; it does no such thing. It explicitly represents the landlords. The landlord lobby group says that it wants these amendments and Independent Ireland says, "Yes, sure. We will put them in immediately." People should be aware of that. I want to raise a particular point about the impact of this in terms of HAP. The point has been made about the HAP levels.”
“It is shocking that it is allowed in the first place, and, whether they agree with it or not, that the TDs affected would not put their hands up and say that they are personally affected by this and recuse themselves from the vote. Even at this late stage, I appeal to landlord TDs not to participate in this vote tonight. It is utterly wrong that landlords, who will personally benefit from the increasing of rents, are going to get to vote on this legislation. They will personally benefit from it while it will have such a devastating effect on so many people. In general, we have a landlords' Government with plenty of landlord TDs, but it is a bit much that literally the landlords' lobbying organisation wrote amendments for TDs and the TDs literally copy and pasted them and submitted them. This is the democratic process.”
“That is the fundamental point and it is why we need to get rid of this Government as soon as we can and build a movement on the streets and in communities to resist these rent increases and the evictions that are going to flow from it and to massively apply pressure on the Government on these issues. I want to raise a point about landlords in this Dáil. It is shocking that about 20% of TDs in the Dáil are going to vote tonight on legislation that is personally going to benefit them. If you are a landlord and you vote in the Dáil tonight to pass this legislation, you are going to personally benefit, on average, to the tune of about €3,000.”
“We have a landlords' Government that represents the interests of the tiny minority that are landlords and the even smaller minority that are big landlords in this country as opposed to all of those who are affected by the housing crisis. The fundamental point is that the Government does not represent those who suffer from the housing crisis but those who profit from the housing crisis. Why does the Government keep introducing policies that make the housing crisis worse? It is time to draw the conclusion that it does not care about ending the housing crisis. If the housing crisis ended, the Government's friends - the developers and the big landlords - would not be able to make the sort of money they are currently able to make.”
“About one third of Government Deputies are landlords but the rest of them represent them very effectively in any case because ideologically they are committed to this idea that the market has to solve things and trickle-down economics. The Government for the past ten years has been implementing all the policies that are supposedly great and will resolve the housing crisis but that have resulted in the housing crisis getting worse, but by a happy coincidence, there is a big transfer of wealth from the public, through the State and taxpayers' money, to landlords and from renters to landlords. That is the essence of it.”
“People may say that this does not make any sense. The Government has not presented any evidence to show what is going to happen and how this is magically going to translate into supply. All the experts are saying this is not working. The Government talks day in, day out about listening to hard-working people and trying to look out for renters, so why on earth is it bringing in a Bill that is going to rapidly increase people's rents? The answer is very simple. If it walks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, it is probably a duck. It is a landlords' Government. That is the bottom-line truth of it. We have a Government that is interested in representing the views and the material interests of big landlords.”
“It will guillotine it and shut down the debate in this House tonight and the consequences are that people's rents are going to rise. What does that look like? It is a massive further transfer of wealth from some of the poorest people in the country to some of the richest people and richest corporations in the country, which are already making plenty of money from their very many rental properties. That is one impact. Another impact is that evictions are going to soar and not from a low point but from a high point. Evictions are already at the same level proportionately as they were in the 1850s in Ireland. Do we know what came after that number of evictions in Ireland in the 1850s? What came after that was the Land War because people simply had enough and I think that is going to come now for the Government as well.”
“This Bill should be called the raise the rent Bill. The purpose of the Bill is to raise people's rents. That is literally it. The Government likes to pretend that there is some greater, deeper meaning going on. It likes to talk about security of tenure but the purpose of this Bill is to raise people's rents. People's rents have already almost doubled in the past ten years but the Government thinks that for the people it represents - the big landlords, the so-called institutional investors - the rents are not rising fast enough so it is going to introduce this Bill to raise the rents even faster to cost the average renter more than €3,000 extra a year. That is the purpose of this Bill and it will be the consequence of this Bill. The Government is going to ram this Bill through.”
“The freshwater pearl mussel gets the blame. All of this is to avoid the question of who rezoned the floodplains, as John Sweeney has noted, who allowed housing closer to riverbanks than was wise and who has drastically underfunded climate adaptation measures for the past 20 years. We need real climate action and real flood adaptation measures.”
“Residents contacted emergency services. However, no emergency services attended the estate. We contacted South Dublin County Council, who stated they had no resources available and advised us to contact emergency services instead. This was predictable, but the State was not prepared. What we have seen since is an attempt by politicians to scapegoat anybody or anything that could be found that could possibly be scapegoated. Met Éireann got blamed. The same people who gave out about too many yellow, orange and red warnings then, all of a sudden, decided that Met Éireann was to blame because it should have had more serious warnings. The habitats directive got the blame. Civil society groups that try to defend our biodiversity and nature and the kinds of measures that would cut across this flooding get the blame.”
“What we have seen over the past few weeks shows how desperately unprepared the State was for the extreme weather we have experienced. This was not unpredicted. It was predicted 20 years ago that the impact of climate change was precisely going to be much wetter weather. The latter expresses itself in extreme events. Unfortunately, this is the music of the future. This is what climate change looks like in Ireland, and it is going to get worse and worse. All over my constituency, people have told me about the damage done to their homes. They have told me that this is not the first time this has happened. There is an overwhelming sense that we were not prepared or assisted properly. A constituent from Rathfarnham told me: There were ten children across six houses blocked in by the water for several hours on our cul-de-sac.”