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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“They were skilled workers confronted with the implementation of new technology that was used to impoverish their communities, to lower the quality of the products they were producing, to take away the autonomy they had previously and to drive child labour. They started off not by breaking machines, but by petitions to the king and the government that fell on deaf ears. They were then forced to resort to insurrectionary practices. They were ultimately crushed by massive state repression, occupation and thousands and thousands of soldiers, but basically the Luddites were right, and we could do with applying the lessons today when it comes to big tech.”
“Do we want crappy paraphrases from ChatGPT taking over the Internet? Do we want uncanny valley videos of people with six hands walking down? Is that the way we want to spend our energy? Is that how we want to use our water? Do we want more far-right content with AI-generated fake videos fomenting hate? Is that what we want? I think we need to look back in time to a previous movement that engaged with new technology and said, "Yes, we want technology, but we want it for the benefit of people. We want it in the control of society, not big corporations." I am reading a book at the moment about the Luddites. The Luddites must be the most maligned movement in history. If you look up the definition of the word Luddite, it means someone who is opposed to technology. The Luddites were not opposed to technology.”
“The Taoiseach claimed yesterday that if we do not enable data centres to massively expand fossil fuel usage, it will damage workers. However, in many cases it will put them out of a job. The Government's own research has found that 30% of Irish workers are in danger of being replaced by AI. Women and people in administrative and creative roles are disproportionately at risk. The World Economic Forum estimates that 85 million workers will lose their jobs to AI in the coming years. We need less of this capture by big tech and more cop-on and the asking of basic questions, like where the massive amounts of rare earth minerals are going to come from. Where is the water going to come from? Where is the energy going to come from? Is it worth trashing our planet and throwing millions of people out of work for the sake of AI-generated slop?”
“I have to say it has been a pretty depressing debate so far, with a few honourable exceptions. Most of the Deputies have swallowed and then regurgitated the spin from big tech. I find it incredible that we had a speech from the new Minister of State with responsibility for AI and its only reference to climate change is about AI being used to help us address sustainability and climate action. There is no mention of the suggestion by many, including Donald Trump, that it will result in a doubling of our power need. Trump envisages that will be filled by coal. The Irish Government clearly envisages that it will be filled a fuel even dirtier than coal, by importing LNG from America. What is AI going to do for workers?”
“The Government is in breach of it because it refuses to provide the resources or show the political will. We know what the answers are. The buck stops with the Government. If we are still in this situation in September, there is no shirking it. I ask the Minister and Minister of State to please meet with the parents.”
“The Department has been contacted about it repeatedly. The conditions in the school are nothing short of shameful. While the teachers are very devoted, as of course are the parents, the conditions in the school are horrendous. There are no proper toilets in reality, concrete is coming up from the floor and there is no accessibility or sensory room in what is a special class. These are horrendous conditions and the teachers are doing their best. The Department has refused invitations by the principal and the board of management to meet with them and is not providing them with resources. The Government is very clearly in breach of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, UNCRPD. The right of children to an education equal to others in their community is spelled out in it.”
“While it is welcome that the Minister and the Minister of State are here and are staying for the whole debate, I wish to ask, and it was asked multiple times, whether they will meet these parents. Will they hear their stories, actual experiences and what their problems actually are? While it is welcome to hear the Government saying there will be 400 extra special classes in September, I do not see it. I do not hear the plan to make that happen. I do not hear where the teachers, the 800 SNAs or the buildings for some of these special classes are going to come from. The reality on the ground does not suggest a different approach in actually putting the necessary resources in. There is one special school, which I will not name, that both the Minister and the Minister of State have been contacted about.”
“She has applied for 12 different schools and has received no acceptances or places for September. I met with Sarah whose daughter, Abi-Leigh, was first down for an assessment of need when she was one and a half. She is now almost five. She has applied to schools and is being told that without the assessment of needs, she is not going to get a place. The assessment of needs is coming, but it is going to be too late for the application process. We could go on and on. There are literally thousands of other parents in a panic because the applications are happening right now and they do not know whether they are going to get an appropriate place for their children.”
“Michelle's son, Charlie, is in precisely that situation. He is in Sacred Heart Senior National School where there is no special class or special teacher and only one SNA who is effectively playing the role of teacher. I have raised Charlotte's daughter, Cyra, multiple times in the previous Dáil term. This time she has applied for 25 schools, of which 22 have rejected her application and she is waiting on a response from three. I met with Anita this evening, who is in the Public Gallery with many other parents, whose son, Leighton, needs a special school place but does not currently have one. He is, therefore, in a mainstream school. Anita is called regularly into the school to change her son's nappy on the floor. I met with Erika, whose son, Marley, has Down's syndrome and autism.”
“There is a major crisis in respect of school places coming down the line again. I hear words but I do not see action to avert that crisis. In 24 hours last week, I was contacted by four different families all in a panic. I was told by Elliot's parents in Celbridge that they had applied for the six relevant schools in their area with special classes and had received rejections from all six. They are in a panic because Elliot is currently in a special preschool and they can see the benefit of that to him and they worry about what will happen if he does not have that. Stephanie's daughter, Myla, is currently in Sacred Heart Junior National School, which has a special class. She can see the benefit of that, but she is looking ahead to going into the senior side where there is no special class. What is going to happen to Myla in that scenario?”
“What is ironic is that the invasion of Ukraine was used in this country to drive an agenda of militarisation, with people saying we needed to align with the US and align with NATO. The coming to an end of this war will now be used to say we need to align and be part of some sort of European process of militarisation. I have a concrete question. Starmer has said he is willing to send British troops on the ground to Ukraine. Simon Harris has not ruled out Irish troops being sent. Will the Taoiseach rule out sending troops abroad? Will he say we will not be sending military aid, whether it is lethal or so-called "non-lethal", for an armed conflict?”
“As we speak, representatives of two big imperialist powers are sitting down in Saudi Arabia to decide the future of Ukraine - to carve it up without any Ukrainian representatives even being present. It is illustrative of the fact that the world we live in is increasingly divided between these big imperialist powers and their rivalries and it underlines the need for Ireland to be a consistent voice against imperialism and oppression and for peace. The Ukrainian people have suffered throughout all of this. They have suffered throughout the horrendous invasion by Russia and now the US is willing to use them, willing to see Ukrainian people suffer in order to attempt to weaken Russia and then for it to walk away when the US, under Trump, decides to pivot to Asia. Their interests have always been at the last of this.”
“They are waiting on a bus and it does not show for a couple of hours because various buses simply do not appear. Yet Go-Ahead Ireland has been rewarded by winning another contract - the so-called ODMA, which is a series of different routes worth €50 million. The bottom line issue is that Go-Ahead Ireland cannot recruit the mechanics to fix the buses because it makes profits by paying the mechanics less than Dublin Bus pays them. Privatisation is a disaster for workers, commuters and our environment. Will the Taoiseach instruct the NTA to return the bus routes to Dublin Bus?”
“The Dublin city centre task force recommends improving public transport by implementing the city centre transport plan. How on earth does the Taoiseach think this is compatible with outsourcing more and more routes to private companies like Go-Ahead Ireland, which has been a disaster for commuters? Workers and students in Tallaght, Knocklyon and Rathfarnham have had their lives turned upside down by the number of no-show buses and ghost buses run by Go-Ahead Ireland. The S6, S8 and S4, all of which are run by Go-Ahead Ireland, are totally unreliable. I have talked to countless people over the past couple of weeks who said they have had to get taxis multiple times to work and can no longer take public transport to work because they do not know whether it will arrive on time.”
“Currently, over 20% of our electricity is being used on data centres. We are going to go to 30% and then beyond. We cannot go in that direction and meet our climate change targets. It is one or the other. That is why the Taoiseach wants to import LNG. He is also going for fossil fuels.”
“The signal the Taoiseach is sending is that he does not care about the climate change challenge and about the emissions targets, because we will blow right past them. He does not care. He does not care about the bills that are going up for ordinary people. He does not care about people who are forced to pay carbon taxes when they have no other way to get to work. He does not care about energy resilience and sustainability when we now have over 20% of our electricity going to data centres. Why? Because big tech says this is how it should be. I read the Taoiseach's column at the weekend. I listened to him describe it as the equivalent of the industrial revolution. He sounds like a man who has drunk too much of the big tech Kool-Aid. He needs to apply some critical faculties. It is not possible.”
“It will be further privatisation, meaning even higher prices. Will the Taoiseach take the science seriously? Will he take climate change seriously? Will he try to avoid the €20 billion in fines the public will have to pay?”
“All of the signs point towards the Government supporting a full commercial LNG terminal in Kerry, making Donald Trump and the Healy-Raes very happy but ignoring the science, which says that imported LNG is even dirtier than coal. One of the first things Trump did when he came to office was to leave the Paris Agreement. We must not follow him in abandoning emissions reductions targets. There can be no more of this hypocrisy of imposing carbon taxes on ordinary people while allowing big tech to blow through the carbon budgets. We already have the second most expensive electricity in Europe. More data centres will make this worse by driving the price of energy up even further. The new CRU policy envisages big tech profiteering from whatever electricity it supplies to the grid, saying that this can provide a revenue stream for them.”
“Over the past five years, all of the additional wind energy produced in Ireland has been more than outstripped by data centre growth. The programme for Government gives the green light for even more of these data centres. Now we have a proposed decision from the CRU which is explicit in saying that they do not even have to use renewable energy. CRU commissioner Dr. Harrington repeatedly, on "Morning Ireland", said it is a "matter for the data centres themselves to choose how they fuel and power themselves". It is almost exactly the same as what Donald Trump said at the World Economic Forum, when he talked about doubling the amount of power produced to benefit data centres and AI. Trump was talking about coal but here it looks like being LNG, which the Taoiseach is planning to import wholesale from the US.”
“We are heading for climate catastrophe. We know that 2024 was the warmest year on record - 1.6 degrees above pre-industrial levels. Already, extreme weather events, hunger and sickness related to climate change are responsible for the loss of 300,000 lives a year. That figure, unfortunately, will only rise. We now have a climate denier in the White House. He says, "drill, baby, drill", but here we have a government supported by climate deniers which is saying, "Burn, baby, burn", to big tech and its data centres. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have turned this country into a dumping ground for big tech. They are currently using more than 20% of our electricity, more than ten times the European average. They will be using one third of our electricity by the end of this decade.”
“I will introduce a Private Member's Bill to do that shortly. I have also raised the need for appropriate funding for schools seeking a school traffic warden. It is a terrible situation when schools and parents have to campaign for school traffic wardens. I will give the example of Riverview Educate Together National School in my constituency. I will quote from a mother who speaks about her daughter being in junior infants and a keen cyclist. She said: I’m grateful for the cycle lanes from Perrystown Community Centre to Limekiln Lane which makes me feel safer. The junction from Mountdown Park on to Limekiln Road feels extremely dangerous and I insist that my five year old avoids it. A school warden would help us to feel a lot safer at this busy junction. South Dublin County Council needs to review and revisit this decision.”
“Despite this, the car industry continues to promote these lethal weapons because they are more profitable to produce than regular cars. The result is more than half of all new cars sold now are SUVs. They have become the second biggest driver of climate change globally over the past decade. It is time to call a halt. Last year, I introduced a Bill to ban the advertising of fossil fuels and fossil fuel vehicles, which would go a long way towards reducing the demand for SUVs. The evidence in road safety shows that electrified SUVs are just as dangerous as fossil-fuelled ones. We need to go further. We need a ban on large SUVs from urban areas. Nobody should be driving around in a glorified truck unless they are a truck with a HGV licence or there is a particular recognised societal need for it.”
“Living this terrible trauma is also André's brother who witnessed everything at only five-years old. The impact on his life is unspeakable. In sentencing André's killer, the judge said: People who drive these vehicles in urban areas where there are a lot of houses have an increased burden of care. It is not the same as driving a car. It certainly is not. Children are eight times more likely to be killed when hit by an SUV or a passenger truck than by a car, yet the car industry keeps selling, advertising and pushing them. Every 300 kg increase in vehicle weight increases the risk of fatal injury by 30% for vulnerable road users. The risk of fatal injuries also increases with bonnet height. SUVs and pick-up trucks are also far more likely to hit people, particularly children, in the first place because they have a much larger blind spot.”
“Anybody who says otherwise or lobbies or argues otherwise is suffering from a serious case of car brain. Another major factor in the increase of casualties on our roads is the trend towards outsized SUVs and pick-up trucks. Only this week we heard of an awful death, the killing of eight-year old André Castro Ladeiro by a man driving a Ford Ranger Wildtrak SUV pick-up truck. André was crossing the road after waiting for the green man at a zebra crossing. In his victim impact statement, André's father, Cesar, said: The bang and him disappearing. I saw it then and every day since. No braking lights on that Ford Ranger Wildtrak. André was just a leaf in the road for that driver. Andre's mother said: There are countless days when I feel lost and I just want to feel close to him.”
“I welcome the recent reduction in speed limits on local rural roads. I also welcome the forthcoming reduction in speed limits on urban roads from 50 km/h to 20 km/h. The facts are absolutely undeniable that speed kills and reducing speed even by a small amount saves limbs and lives. Research published by the Department of Transport shows there is "an extremely strong and fundamental relationship between speed and injuries." When speed limits were reduced to 30 km/h in Bristol in 2019, fatal injuries fell by 63%. Minor and serious injuries also fell. The same has been happening in Wales where speed limits were reduced by 20 mph or 30 mph. As a result, 100 fewer people were killed or seriously injured over the past year. Lower speed limits are a no-brainer when it comes to road safety.”
“Most ordinary people would agree there are few worse crimes than making people homeless, yet the legal system treats criminal landlords with kid gloves. This Bill is a small first step towards justice for renters and only a landlord or a landlords' government would object to it.”
“It is a Government that is now waging war on tenants, threatening the rip up the rent pressure zones and signalling to landlords and vulture funds to let it rip even more than they have already. My Bill would enact the Government's own 2015 legislation to set up a deposit protection scheme managed by the RTB. Instead of landlords holding tenant's deposits and using them as a form of power over tenants, all deposits would instead be lodged with the RTB which would adjudicate on any disputes. We also want to see radical reform of the RTB. Tenants' unions should be represented so the dispute resolution system is not stacked against tenants and in favour of landlords. I would like to see landlords who rob their tenants, force them to live in slum conditions or evict them illegally prosecuted and sent to prison.”
“Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael Governments have been promising to introduce a deposit protection scheme since 2011. It was legislated for in 2015 but never enacted. Housing for All acknowledges that, "deposit retention can cause serious hardship for tenants, as many will require the return of their deposit in order to access alternative rental accommodation." Action 2.12 of Housing for All, which has been sitting there since 2021, was to "examine the creation of a system of holding rental deposits, informed by international experience", but still, the Government has chosen not to act. Why? It is because it is a Government of landlords, by landlords for landlords.”
“I also have cases of constituents who are reliant on homeless HAP, where the local authority provided them with a deposit but the landlord or letting agent has stolen it and the constituents are being refused money for a second deposit. They are threatened with homelessness because they do not have the money themselves for a new deposit and the council will not provide it. In another case, a landlord is threatening to steal a tenant's deposit unless she moves out on the date on the notice to quit, regardless of whether that notice is legal or not. Threatening to steal a deposit is a means of coercion for landlords who use it to evict tenants and dissuade them from taking cases to the RTB. Of course this Government knows this, as successive Governments before it knew it.”
“I am frequently contacted by constituents who are facing or actually in homelessness because a greedy landlord or estate agent stole their deposit. One mother whose landlord stole her deposit is now living in emergency homeless accommodation and cannot afford to take her landlord to court to get her money back. The Residential Tenancies Board has refused to help, apparently because the landlord never registered the tenancy. It keeps telling her to contact Threshold which, in turn, sends her back to the RTB. She and her child are now trapped in homeless accommodation because a greedy landlord stole the only savings she had.”
“Anyone who has ever rented in this country will have a story of how their landlord stole some or all of their deposit. It is so commonplace that Threshold describes it as a normal experience. What makes this everyday injustice all the more disgusting is that it involves landlords who are much better off than their tenants stealing from people who are on far lower incomes than they are. According to the CSO, the average net wealth of owner-occupiers is almost €304,000. Landlords, by definition, almost always own more than one property so their wealth will be much greater than that. Let us compare that to renters. Their average net wealth is only €5,300. For many renters, a deposit of €1,000 or €2,000 is the only savings they have, the only thing standing between them and homelessness.”
“I move: That leave be granted to introduce a Bill entitled an Act to amend the Residential Tenancies (Amendment) Act 2015 so that the provisions in that Act for tenant deposits to be sent to the Residential Tenancies Board are commenced within 90 days of the passing of this Act. I am introducing this Bill to protect tenants' deposits today because it is one of the most common and damaging forms of theft - a type of theft that goes, almost always, unpunished. I refer to landlords stealing their tenants' deposits. Deposit theft accounts for almost one-in-five cases taken to the Residential Tenancies Board, RTB. It is the second biggest reason cases are taken by tenants. In 2021, the RTB found in favour of tenants in 94% of cases and ruled that their deposit should be fully or partially refunded by the landlord.”
“How is that going to be done and when is it going to be done? Will it be through a ministerial order or through legislation? Again, how can this possibly be justified? Is €176,000 for being a junior Minister, four times average earnings, not enough for a junior Minister? I will leave it there and, hopefully, come back in on the other sections.”
“Is the Minister not embarrassed to have his first act in this Government and in this Dáil be such a stroke and to be so blatant in sharing out the spoils of political office? Is he not embarrassed to have to trot out the line that "Oh, it is really about the size of the population and we need more people" and so on? Does it not cause him to cringe even a little bit inside to so blatantly make Ministers of one sort or another not far off one in two Government TDs? Does he not see it is very blatant and obvious to people what is happening here? This is not in the Bill but it has been reported in relation to the junior Ministers that the law is going to be changed to enable them to continue to receive the travel and accommodation allowance received by TDs who are not Ministers. For some, this will be worth upwards of €35,000 annually.”
“First, I am disappointed that my proposed amendment and the amendment from Deputy Gibney were ruled out of order. I understand the reason given was that they were not in line with the spirit of the Bill. Deputy Gibney's amendment sought to have the maximum number of junior Ministers set at 20, while I sought to have it set at 15. It seems to me that this is legislation changing the number of junior Ministers. I wonder whether, if we had changed the proposed figure from 20 to 24, it would have been in order. Are we only allowed to increase the number of junior Ministers and not decrease it? Perhaps we can discuss that somewhere.”
“If the Government wants to change the Constitution and the rules, that is fine, but it has to go to the people to do it, because the people have the right to decide.”
“They act as Ministers, breaching the Constitution for the sole purpose of spreading around the spoils of office. It is another grand political stroke for which ordinary people pay. Former Deputy, Leo Varadkar went on to make the point that it is time to bite the bullet and amend the Constitution to allow for the number of senior Ministers to increase. That is fine; let us have that discussion. We are in favour of a different kind of constitution, which puts people's rights to the fore and there would not be secret discussions. Let us have a discussion in that context about how many Ministers we have. That is fine, but one cannot just get around the Constitution by this invention of the concept of super junior Ministers.”
“It will not ultimately be decided here, but there is a lot of evidence to suggest that the super junior Ministries are a breach of the Constitution. The Constitution is clear that the Government should have a maximum of 15 members and that it should act collectively and confidentially. The presence or attendance of these so-called super junior Ministers is clearly in breach of that. I do not know whether it was conscious or unconscious, but former Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, gave away the game about this when he wrote in The Sunday Times three weeks ago that the super junior Ministries were used "to get around the 'rule of 15'", explaining that at Cabinet they are treated as equals, they have a full set of advisers and they bring their own memos for decisions. They get the extra allowances, attend and participate in all Cabinet decisions.”
“Supposedly, this idea emerged from nowhere in the negotiations and did not relate to the various people who were to become the junior Ministers saying they wanted these extra expenses. The other clear example of the sharing out of the spoils of power that this is really about is the increase in the number of so-called super junior Ministers. What started out as one super junior Minister to facilitate Democratic Left being in government in 1994 has now ballooned into a record four. How many will it ultimately end up being if the Government is not stopped in the courts? Their role in the secret deals between Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the groups of Independent TDs is revealed by the fact that two of the four so-called super junior Ministers are from the Regional Independent Group, with Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael getting one each.”
“Some of them were putting on the poor mouth, saying they are losing out because as a result of getting that, they lose access to the travel and accommodation allowance TDs get, which is a banded system based on how far away from the Dáil Members live. For those who live farthest away, it is in excess of €35,000. The former Fine Gael Chief Whip, Paul Kehoe, claim that junior Ministers were sleeping in hostels as a result. They are paid €176,000 between salary and expenses, yet somehow were unable to afford hotels and, therefore, needed these additional tens of thousands of euro in another set of expenses. This is an idea that supposedly has no parent. Deputy Michael Healy-Rae said it has nothing to do with him.”
“That is just cover for the real reason, which is the sharing of the spoils of power between a number of different parties and groupings. That is revealed by the fact that this is the first Bill and includes extra allowances for the so-called super junior Ministers. The next act, which I presume will be done by ministerial order - the Minister might clarify that - will be to push through additional expenses for junior Ministers. Previously, junior Ministers had to make do on the supposedly modest combined salary and expenses of €176,000 per year. That is more than four times the national average earnings.”
“The Government has tried, in a way impressively - with a brass neck - to say all these extra Ministers of State are needed because of the bigger population or the additional complexity of running things and so on. The Government does not believe it. The public does not believe it. No one believes that is what is really going on here. The idea that it is linked to the size of population does not hold any water. The other night, I looked up the size of the government in various countries around the world. It varies quite a bit, but there is not much correlation between the number of ministers and the size of the population. There are larger countries with fewer ministers. Denmark, for example, has a population of 6 million and 25 ministers. Other smaller countries have more ministers. It does not relate to population size.”
“It is the highest number of Ministers, junior Ministers and super duper junior Ministers and the highest percentage there has ever been. Not far off one in every two Government TDs will be a Minister or so-called Minister in one form or another, that is, 38 of 95 Government TDs. It is incredible. It gives us a hint about what the negotiations between Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, the Lowry Regional Independent Group and the Healy-Raes were really about. It was not so much about policy because effectively the Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael manifestos were mashed together, concrete targets were left out and then the Regional Independent Group nodded that through with a tweak here or there. Instead, the focus was clearly on how many snouts can fit into the public trough.”
“I am sharing time with Deputy Healy. I will leave at least three minutes for him, maybe more. We will see. Here we are with the first Bill of this Dáil and this Government, and we are off to an extremely bad start, both procedurally, because the debate is being guillotined, and with respect to what the Government is proposing. We are having a short Second Stage debate and then we will be straight into our amendments, all of which have been ruled out of order. We will have a tiny amount of time for that and then - bang - it will all be voted through this evening. Regarding content, the purpose of the priority, first Bill of the Government is to create an additional three new junior Ministers and one additional so-called super junior Minister.”
“The quickest, easiest and most immediate response to the housing crisis is to deal with the scourge of vacancy and dereliction. In almost every estate in Dublin South-West one will find vacant houses. These are perfectly good homes or they were at one stage. They could be used to house families. Instead, they are a blight on the community. We got figures recently that 14,500 of the more than 100,000 vacant properties in the country are located in Dublin. There are more than 10,000 families in emergency accommodation in Dublin. This is the easy answer. We recently put a motion before South Dublin County Council calling on it to use its powers to bring these properties into public ownership by means of compulsory purchase orders and use them for social housing. Fianna Fáil abstained and Fine Gael voted against.”
“This morning, in the Government's countermotion on housing, it states it is engaging "with domestic lenders to ensure that the banking sector is appropriately using its lending capacity to support the development of new housing nationwide" and developing "new financing sources, especially for brownfield sites and small builders with support from ... domestic banks as well as State support of equity investment". This is a long-winded way of saying that the Government wants the banks to lend more to property developers. The Taoiseach has suffered badly from amnesia in the past. He claimed that there was no bank bailout, for example. Has he also forgotten that the banks were bailed out because of billions of euro of bad loans to private developers?”
“The Taoiseach is the last man standing from the Fianna Fáil Governments that blew up the property bubble and then saw the whole thing come crashing down and ordinary people paid the price for a decade or so. It seems the Taoiseach is committed to going back to the future. He is resurrecting the same policies that caused the 2008 financial crash. At the weekend, it was tax breaks for developers, whom the banking inquiry, the Housing Commission and many others found to be instrumental in blowing up that bubble. There was also a proposal to lift the rent pressure zones.”
“He talks about this being about getting rid of the veto the Security Council powers have on the deployment of our forces. Does the Taoiseach accept that no such veto exists because of the Defence (Amendment) Act introduced in 2006, which makes clear that it is not only peacekeeping missions endorsed or agreed by the Security Council that unlock the third element of the triple lock but that resolutions of the General Assembly of the UN would also do so? The Taoiseach has a duty to tell people which missions he wants to send Irish troops on that he cannot currently do. The triple lock is currently in place. Where would he like to send Irish troops that he cannot because of the existence of the triple lock? He has a duty to inform people about that.”
“I see some other people in the Chamber who were also on the streets protesting. I think the Taoiseach was in government and that Government of course, while not sending troops - because it could not do so under the triple lock - to participate in that invasion, did facilitate the invasion by allowing US troops to go through Shannon Airport. Some 4 million have gone through the airport at this stage. The triple lock was the one thing that meant the Government could not send troops abroad to participate in the US-led war of invasion and occupation for oil and profit. This attack on neutrality is being done in a very misleading way, so I want to challenge the Taoiseach on a couple of assertions, in particular on one he has made repeatedly.”
“The programme for Government refers to reforming the triple lock legislation. It was reported last Friday that a draft law to end the triple lock will shortly be brought to Cabinet. Will the Taoiseach provide some detail on this? In what way is the triple lock going to be ended or reformed? Back in 2013, the Taoiseach, who was not then Taoiseach, hit the nail on the head when he said that the triple lock was at the core of our neutrality and described the attempt to remove it as an out-of-touch ideological obsession by Fine Gael. That is, unfortunately, an obsession the Taoiseach has now adopted, and it seems with even more gusto than Fine Gael. The Taoiseach might clarify, but I think he was in government when the invasion of Iraq took place. I was on the streets protesting against the invasion of Iraq.”