Richard Boyd Barrett
Dún Laoghaire · People Before Profit-Solidarity · Ireland
“It is absolutely incredible that about 50% to 57% of all professional artists in this country live on or below the poverty line - three times the level of poverty in Irish society generally.”
“On a global level, the consumption of electricity by data centres is due to go up elevenfold by 2030. They are hoovering up the water resources and electricity resources of the planet. There will not be much human creativity, art or music if we have no water and no energy. That is what is going on with these people.”
“St. Joseph's Centre in Shankill is the largest care home dedicated solely to dementia care in the country. SIPTU members feel compelled to take industrial action tomorrow because of the failure of St. John of God's to recognise the work and duties that they do.”
“These people actually want to replace human beings and human creativity with AI. That would literally be the road to disaster for humanity. Some people think about AI as if it is cutting edge and the most advanced thing possible, but AI is like the Neanderthal.”
“Against that background, we are seeing these billionaires who run AI looking to steal en masse all of the artistic and creative output of humanity and to profit from it. The artists rightly are asking what the Government is going to do to prevent them making a bad situation for most artists and performers even worse.”
“I thank Deputy Ó Snodaigh for bringing this motion forward. As Deputy Paul Murphy indicated, People Before Profit is very happy to support and commend all the artists, organisations, musicians and so on who are campaigning to bring this forward.”
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“Most of the points have been made about these amendments. I want the Minister to try to explain at what point he seriously believes the supply he is talking about is going to lead to a reduction in rents. Will he give us some indication? I think it is total fantasy. In the explanatory memorandum to the Bill and in his speech introducing the Bill, the Minister said that rents for long-standing tenancies should not fall behind the market. That is what the investors want. They are saying that if they have to deal with rents that are lower than the market, they are not going to build because the Government's rent controls are too restrictive as far as they are concerned and limit their ability to charge €2,500 or €3,000 per month. Therefore, they want the Government to get rid of them in order to incentivise them to come in and build.”
“Anyway, they will not go up to the level, so they will be in even more difficulty paying these unaffordable rents. That means they are going to get into trouble, people are going to get into arrears and they are going to get evicted as a result. That is what is actually going on. I do not know how the Minister can possibly justify this. The reason we are here, angry and talking about it is not because we want a social media clip. It is because, next week and in the months after, we are going to have to deal with the human misery that comes through the door of our offices as a result of what he is doing. That is the reason we are speaking about this and proposing that he abandon this Bill and actually listen to what others are saying. The Government has had its chance and has failed on housing.”
“Now, the Government is going to make that even more hopeless because people will be looking for rents of €2,500 or €3,000 a month, putting them in an even more hopeless position. For those few people who got a HAP tenancy but are paying a top-up - if they are on a social housing list, they would have to pay a top-up to get a HAP tenancy these days - this has already put them in a difficult position and it is threatening to drive them into arrears at any time. If there are any difficulties in their situation, any extra costs come in for kids or anything like that, they could easily find themselves in difficulty, but now those rents are going to go up. Almost certainly, the HAP rates will not go up to match that. Even if they do, it just means the State is now paying for it.”
“It, therefore, wants to pass legislation that will ensure landlords can do so, despite the housing misery that is causing for people. I think about the families who come in to me - I am sure they must come in to the Minister - saying it is their second year in emergency accommodation and they have been told they are 200th on the housing list. There is no chance of them getting a council house for at least seven or eight years. They are told to go out and find a HAP property. That means finding a property within the homeless HAP rate. They might be allowed to look for something for, say, €2,000 a month. No such thing exists. Imagine how hopeless people feel. They are told to go out and find something within that limit but it does not actually exist out there.”
“In Stockholm, a renters' union negotiates the rents on a regular basis with the landlords, rent controls are used to set price ceilings and rents are set based on the utility value of the property. Without those rent controls, it is estimated that rents would be 68% higher in Stockholm than they currently are. Where else has rent controls? Barcelona has them. Rent increases are limited and they have ceilings and so on. Rent controls work there, and Berlin also has rent controls. The things we are proposing, and propose time and again, can be and are done elsewhere. The Government just does not want to do it because it and the landlords find it difficult that they cannot put rents up to the highest possible level.”
“If people cannot pay that, and in many cases it is much higher than that, is it their fault if they get evicted? It is not really, is it? It is the Government's fault that it has let rents go up to that level. Is what we are saying when we say keep rents down to particular levels really so off the charts that nobody else is doing it? Just to be clear, we want to reset rents downward, not just freeze them. I will mention four cities where rent control works. Vienna has a system of rent ceilings so rents cannot be put above a certain level. Some 43% of all the housing in Vienna is social housing and it has hard limits on rent increases. They have rents per square metre which are a fraction of ours - about a third of what people are paying here on average.”
“That will mean going on daft.ie and seeing if they can find three rents at €2,500, €3,000, or whatever price. That will be the result of all this. What are we saying? We are saying rents should be based on the ability of people to pay. We are saying people should not be evicted when they have done nothing wrong or, for that matter, as is the case now for lots of people, because they cannot afford unaffordable rents. People should not be evicted for not being able to afford unaffordable rents when more than €24,000 in after-tax income is required to pay the average rent in Dublin now. This is after-tax income, so €33,000 or €34,000 gross of a renter's income has to go to pay an average rent in Dublin. What are we talking about there? It is more than 50% of average earnings.”
“Rather than them building unaffordable stuff, let us have them build affordable stuff. It is unbelievable what the Government is doing with this Bill in terms of the position of tenants. I would defy any tenant at the end of this to know what sort of tenant they are. Are they a tenant of a big landlord or of a small landlord? Are they a student tenant? There are different rules for them. Are they a tenant post-March 2026 or pre-2026? Even for pre-2026 tenants, there is a different demarcation depending on whether the tenancy is from before or after 2022. We are going to have great fun trying to figure out even what sort of tenants we are talking about and what position they are in. The landlords, however, will know there is an incentive to get these tenants out so they can reset the rents up to the highest possible level.”
“If we could do it in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s on a pretty big scale, when the country was virtually a third-world country, we can certainly do it now with enormous budget surpluses and record economic growth. If we look at the Central Bank figures on wealth, I think household wealth in this country is €1.3 trillion now, with about half of it sitting in the banks. The credit unions were banging down the Government's door for years saying they had €4 billion or €5 billion they were willing to put into housing, no problem. On the idea that we do not have suggestions, People Before Profit produced a policy document a few years ago titled, A State Construction Company. Two other parties have similar views on a State construction company. Let us build on the land we have and employ people directly.”
“That is in plain English. Just in case there was any doubt about the motive, at the beginning of this year, the Minister, Deputy Lawless, when discussing the Government's thinking, said: ... housing is about international markets. It is actually a spreadsheet in Zurich, New York or Antwerp, more so than a builder looking at a site in Longford or Roscommon, that is actually deciding what happens here. The point is, it should be the builder in Roscommon or Dublin or wherever it is, looking at the land we have that is zoned, available, serviced and so on. They should be looking at the labour we have available and saying we need houses for the people in this community, so let us build them.”
“You did not have families with kids in homeless accommodation when I first came into the Dáil. Now, it is absolutely normalised and it will increase because of this. Then, the Minister comes forward with a Bill and says, to use his own words, "We do not want rents for long-term tenancies to fall behind market rents". That is the purpose of this Bill. Under no circumstances must we have low rents. That is what the Minister is saying.”
“At the point at which they think their profits are going to go down, they are going to stop. That is what they will do. The idea that we will get to a magical point somewhere where rents and house prices go down somehow is just total fantasy. The only instance of that is a massive crash. That is what we actually got the last time we had this mad policy of dancing to the investors' tune. It never really stopped but the dire crash of 2008 resulted from this madness of doing what they tell the Government. Then the housing crisis ensued. At that time, for example, it was unknown, for me in Dún Laoghaire and for most people in the country, to have families with kids in emergency accommodation. It just never happened. There was a particular profile to people who were in emergency accommodation. They were often very vulnerable.”
“Forgetting about all the digital figures floating around, there is a finite amount of labour, land and materials, regardless of whether it is being used to build affordable and social housing or to build something else. It was often not doing anything at all because, for periods of time, the people who controlled the land, the labour and the capital decided they would not build anything until it was profitable enough to do so, and that is what they did. A lot of the people who got the distressed assets from NAMA at a discount price sat on them or leaked the stuff very slowly. This is a very important point that the Minister needs to understand. Never, ever, are the investors he is looking to court, lure and incentivise here going to build to the point that their profits go down. Why would they?”
“If it had started building public and affordable housing then instead of doing the exact opposite, we would not be in this mess at all. It had the assets and so on. A point worth making regarding foreign private investment is that the houses that are built are built by labour in this country. When talking about capital from abroad, all the money is digits on a computer screen but the homes are built on land here, by people here and with materials sourced here. Those people are either building stuff that is affordable, like social and affordable housing, or they are building to make a profit, which is what is happening at the moment. What they are building is unaffordable. Of course, they are building hotels and things like that as well because it is profitable to do so.”
“The debate in this House went on for hours as we tried to explain why the scheme was going to be a disaster because it would replace social housing provision by the State with outsourcing of provision to the private sector. Of course, that turned out to be the case. The other big feature of that policy was the then Minister for Finance, Michael Noonan, meeting with representatives of the vulture funds that were invited in to buy up all the distressed property. It was a deliberate policy. He met with people from 65 or so vulture funds in 2013 and basically asked them to take over all the distressed property in the hands of NAMA. We said it would be a disaster. For a brief while, the then Government had the housing sector in its hands.”
“It basically said the Government was stopping direct capital investment in public housing and would instead outsource its provision. The word "HAP" did not appear at that point but it was the beginning of the idea. RAS was in place at the time but HAP had not yet arrived. I remember putting out a press release and holding a press briefing, which only one journalist attended. I tried to explain that the Government was proposing, in effect, to do away with the direct provision of social housing and that this would be a disaster. I remember when HAP was introduced during the term of the then Minister of State, Jan O'Sullivan.”
“I really am furious at the Minister's comments that this debate is about social media clips. It diminishes the seriousness of what is at stake here. I have been a Member of this House since 2011. I was here two or three months when a circular was produced by the then Department of the environment, within which responsibility for housing was a matter for a Minister of State rather than having a Ministry in its own right. That was because we did not then have the homelessness and housing crisis we have now. The need for housing to come under a senior Ministry arose from the housing crisis that commenced a few years later. There was no fanfare and no press releases from the then Fine Gael-Labour Party in respect of the circular of 2011.”
“People who want something done about this housing crisis and who want to get affordable rents, secure and affordable housing and to protect tenants' rights need to begin to get organised on the streets.”
“They try to evict people, eventually drive them out and sit on the properties, in this case for nearly a decade. It is perfectly empty when there are people homeless on the street outside. They do this because it is profitable to do it and the Government allows that. It is absolutely shocking and now the Government is going to facilitate even further that sort of profiteering. There is a lot more to be said and I am sure my colleagues here will be saying many of those things but this is a disgrace. The best place for people who are worried about the housing crisis to be is out protesting. I hope we see more protests against this because the Government has really revealed its true colours on this one and we need to fight back.”
“Eight or nine years later, the majority of the units, all of them perfect units, are sitting there empty since it was taken over by a vulture fund and then another vulture fund which tried to mass-evict the tenants. It eventually drove them out. We successfully resisted some of the attempts to evict people but eventually, with the grind of being threatened constantly with eviction and having to go to the RTB, people just left. Some of the people did get housed by the council. The majority of those properties continue to sit there empty because it suits the vulture fund for them to be empty in order that it can get beyond the existing legislation's restrictions on rent increases, eventually jack up the rents again and get around the existing RPZs. That is what they do. The landlords play the long game. They inflict misery on the tenants.”
“That loophole comes into play if the house, the residence, is not suitable to the person's need. Do you know that means? It means a tenant can get evicted for their rental property being overcrowded. If a person with no kids then has a child, or a person has another child, the residence is now not suitable to their needs because they need a bigger place. A landlord can say, "Sorry, I am evicting you because there are more people in the house than there was when I signed the lease to put you in." That will be allowed for under the legislation. They will find ways to do that. Do these corporate landlords do that kind of thing? Oh they absolutely do. I have the living proof in a multi-unit development called St. Helen's Court which is across the road from my constituency office in Dún Laoghaire. I do not know how many times I have raised it.”
“Huge numbers of people are in serious trouble due to the top-ups they are having to pay because they are also paying a council-based rent and council rents are now going up as well. There is a change in Dublin city. They are moving now to increase rents in Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown. It is being done in different ways in different places, but across the country local authority rents are going up as well. Some of the most vulnerable people will get a double hit because of what the Government is doing, driving even more people into homelessness and crisis situations. On the protection of tenancy thing, there is a loophole I guarantee will be exploited by the landlords now for those tenants where there is a little bit of nominally greater protection because of the six-year thing, though it is also possible now.”
“If we go on daft.ie and look for something now, they are €2,500, €3,000 and €3,500. All rents will be up to that level. There will be dramatic increases and that will happen all over the country, exacerbating the housing crisis and driving more people into homelessness because there is literally nowhere for them to go that is affordable. That is what is going to happen. I will mention a couple of other consequences of all of this. People who are on HAP will potentially get a double hit on all of this. Many of the people who are on HAP are paying top-up payments to the private landlord, and the HAP levels, inadequate as they are, are not adjusted for rent increases. Therefore, if your landlord increases the rent and you are on HAP, the top-up you have to pay is even more.”
“All of this extraordinary action is supposedly justified on the basis there will be some greater protection and security for tenants by way of the six-year rule. The problem with that is if rents are unaffordable and if people can still be evicted for not being able to pay the rent, which will be allowed to happen, then the likelihood of not being able to pay an unaffordable rent and therefore getting evicted is a lot higher. Some 60,000 to 70,000 tenancies end on a voluntary basis or just end. That means almost all tenancies - 60,000 to 70,000 a year - will end over a period of about a decade. That means all rents very quickly will be unaffordable. In Dublin, the average rent is €2,100 and they will all go up to the level of what is advertised on daft.ie .”
“These homes will end up being owned by big property investment funds, large international pension funds and so on, which will charge these extortionate rents. Now the Government wants a reset in order that even higher rents can be charged. By the way, the developer does not want to build the town centre that is needed by the community because it cannot make as much profit out of doing so. That is where this stuff leads. The Government thinks these people will reduce rents as a consequence of allowing them to reset those rents upwards. It is absolute nonsense. This Government measure will increase investor profits, make rents even more unaffordable and lead to increased speculation. It will do nothing to reduce rents. In fact, it will do worse than nothing in that it will exacerbate the housing crisis.”
“We were actively seeking at the time for those houses to be built. We were not objecting; we were asking that they be built. However, the investors sat and waited for the value of those properties to go up and the housing crisis to get worse. Then they started to flip them to other property developers. Mel Reynolds said to me at the time that Hines probably made a profit on Cherrywood before a single brick was laid. It made profit from speculating on zoned land. What prices are being charged for the houses and apartments Hines eventually started to build there? The houses are going for €600,000 and €700,000, which is unaffordable for the vast majority of people. The rents being charged are €2,000, €2,500, €3,000 and €3,500 a month, which are likewise unaffordable for the vast majority of people.”
“The reason we have a housing crisis is because the entire housing sector was handed over by the State to property investors after the crisis of 2008 to 2009. Cherrywood, in my area, as the biggest residential development in the entire country and one of the biggest in Europe, offers a pretty good test case of housing policy. At the point when that development was taken over by the National Asset Management Agency, NAMA, and thereby nationalised and brought into public ownership, it could have been developed by the State to deliver social and affordable housing. Instead, Governments led by Fine Gael and subsequently Fianna Fáil decided to hand it to property investors. The consequence of this was that for quite a few years, those investors sat on the development because it was more profitable to do that than to build houses.”
“It is absolutely unconscionable that we have a proposal that will jack up already unaffordable rents to even more unaffordable levels and that people in here who vote for it might benefit financially from it. That is outrageous. There is a disproportionate number of landlords among the Members from the Government parties of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael and among some of the Independent Members backing up the Government. The number is disproportionate in the context of the political parties in the Dáil and in terms of broader representation in society. Beyond the question of people financially benefiting, we have a Government that believes the nonsense that somehow property investors will solve the housing crisis. I kind of cannot believe it.”
“It is like the argument made by the US military during the Vietnam War that it needed to bomb villages to save them. The Government is saying that to reduce rents, it must increase them. It is perverse Orwellian logic. Rents must be allowed to be reset to even more unaffordable levels because somehow, by magic, that will make them go down at some point in the future. There is no evidence, ever or anywhere, of that happening. This is market dogma of the absolutely worst kind. The reason the Government is not bothered that it makes no sense whatsoever is that, in fact, the Bill will do what the Government really wants it to do, which is to further enrich property speculators, investors and corporate landlords. My view is that Members of the Dáil who are landlords should recuse themselves from this debate and should not vote on the Bill.”
“There can be no other explanation for what the Government is doing with this Bill. My amendment No. 1 sought, in essence, to stop the Bill until the Government had looked at what its impact would be on the affordability of rents, had addressed the issue of no-fault evictions and had a plan to make rents affordable. In the absence of that amendment, which was ruled out of order, amendment No. 2 seeks to force the Government to do those things in the aftermath of passing the Bill. Of course, I do not believe the Government is in any way serious about addressing those issues, whether before, during or after the Bill is passed, because if it were, it would not have introduced the Bill in the first place. However, for the sake of form, let us rehearse the Government's argument.”
“(4) Within three months of the coming into operation of this act the Minister shall produce a report aimed at establishing the principle of preventing "no fault" evictions.". The best place to be to respond to the Government's Bill probably is with the protestors assembling outside Leinster House. The Bill will make an already dire housing crisis even worse by allowing landlords charging extortionate rents that are unaffordable for huge numbers of people to reset those rents to even higher levels. It beggars belief that the Government is doing this unless one remembers that it is not really representing the interests of the people affected by the crisis but, rather, is representing the interests of those profiteering on the backs of the housing misery of others.”
“I move amendment No. 2: In page 5, between lines 29 and 30, to insert the following: "(2) Within three months of the coming into operation of this act the Minister shall produce a report into the affordability of current rents and establish a board to reset rents to affordable levels, where the guideline for establishing affordability will be rents that are, in general, no more than 20 per cent of a tenant’s income. (3) Within three months of the coming into operation of this act the Minister shall produce a report into the establishing of a principle that the rights of a tenant shall not be affected by the size or type of the landlord and/or the date of the tenancy commencement.”
“It is not that I want to infringe on free speech – I genuinely do not – but somebody does have to judge whether a line has been crossed and whether something is completely wrong, unfair, baseless, slanderous, defamatory and has taken away someone’s good name and character. Given the choice between an individual judge and a representative body of one's peers, I know which I think is fairer. This is elementary in the justice system. That is true about other things as well, including serious criminal matters. Is it just that the Government is dancing to the tune of the owners of the media outlets and flying in the face of what should really be an elementary legal principle of the justice system? It seems that is what the Minister is doing. I want to flag that I believe this is fundamentally wrong and that we will be voting against it.”
“-----mean that some guidance has being given in that area. In any event, I just do not see how replacing juries in the context of making these decisions, even when it comes to the awards people might get if their good name and reputation have been taken, with a single individual, namely a judge, can be a good thing. The only plausible explanation - it would be interesting to know if this is the case - is that those who own the big media outlets want what is being proposed. Let us be honest, sensational comments about people that may veer into the area of being defamatory or slanderous sell newspapers. They can go further when it comes to the algorithms used by certain social media outlets for that matter.”
“They are supposed to represent a broad spectrum of society. Judges, even the best of them, cannot do that. So why is the Government doing what is proposed here? A claim was put forward to the effect that this has to do with disproportionate awards that were being given out. That has already been dealt with, because the changes made since the Supreme Court's decision in 2022-----”
“If we are talking about somebody’s good name and reputation, then who better to judge that than a group of their peers – 12 of their peers rather than just one individual – because they are surely in a far better position to assess whether someone's reputation and good name have been damaged and whether what has been done in that regard was fair or not? Surely a jury of one's peers is the ideal group to assess whether that is the case rather than a judge who, even if they are the best judge in the world, is just one individual who inevitably only represents a particular section of society. I do not think Bernard Barton would disagree with me when I say that even the best judges cannot be said to represent the broad spectrum of society. The chances that a jury might do that are far greater. That is the whole point of juries.”
“The fact that anyone who is seriously concerned with the administration of justice, including the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, those who represent the legal profession and even the Minister, when he was in opposition - which I did not know – have opposed this kind of says it all. Now, however, it is going to be pushed through. I would be curious to know if the Minister has any justification for this. Think about it. For those who might be watching these proceedings, what we are discussing here relates to someone who is defamed and who takes a case because their good name and reputation is being taken from them. In such circumstances, a person's right to have a case on whether their good name and reputation has been taken heard by a jury of their will be decided by one individual, namely a judge.”
“One of the disadvantages of being a small party is that it is not possible to follow every piece of legislation. However, I did speak against this Bill earlier. I am taking time to speak against it again because it strikes at the heart of a basic principle of justice, which is the right of people to have serious matters that impinge on them judged by a jury of their peers. That is a fundamental basic principle of law. To undermine it, without any real explanation or justification, is extremely worrying. That is what is happening here. People do not follow these things, which is understandable. They may seem quite technical to them. Deputy Kelly referred to Judge Bernard Barton. I thank the Deputy for briefing me to some degree on this and for highlighting why it is such a problem.”
“There was a commitment to a second phase, to it not being a one-size-fits-all approach, to recognising the trauma and suffering and the State's responsibility in exacerbating that trauma and suffering the families are still going through, and the Government managed to do it again. After all the years of fighting for truth, justice and so on, the State insults the Stardust families again with an announcement that reneges on commitments that were made to the families. It is really shocking.”
“All of the forensic material relating to the Dublin bombing was sent North to be given to the PSNI when we now know the British were colluding with the loyalist paramilitaries that carried it out. We outsourced responsibility for investigating this to the jurisdiction that we now know was responsible for colluding with the people who carried out the atrocity. The families seem to have a lot of faith in Denton. Whether that is justified or not, I do not know but even there, the investigation is essentially outsourced to another jurisdiction, rather than the Irish State itself taking responsibility for getting to the truth of these things. That leads to the Stardust issue today as well. What is at the heart of the anger that the Stardust families are expressing today is that a promise to engage with them on the process was reneged upon.”
“The families have no idea when they are going to actually see the report. All the energy of the Government seems to be directed at scoring political points against Sinn Féin instead of at the British Government, the issue of the leaks and the lack of justice, truth and accountability for the victims of the single biggest atrocity, the Dublin and Monaghan bombings. I find it extraordinary. There is a pattern, however. With the crimes of the British State and British Empire, there is never accountability. There is always impunity, just like there is for Israel. We also see it here in the Irish State. Can the Irish State please explain to me, or is it even concerned about the fact, that the investigation into the Dublin and Monaghan bombings was shut down after 11 weeks?”
“No expressions of outrage or determination on the part of the Irish Government that we are going to get to the bottom of this. Who received the draft report of Denton? It was the PSNI and the Garda. From what I understand, families think it is unlikely that anybody in Denton leaked the report, so the only other two groups that saw the draft report were the Garda and the PSNI. It was leaked to the Belfast Telegraph two months before it was due to be published and a podcast went out from the Belfast Telegraph about it as well. As a result, the actual report has not been published. The families, who are fighting for truth and justice, are at the centre of all this. The Taoiseach said: "The Government has consistently called for a victim-centred approach to legacy issues." Where is the victim-centred approach to this?”
“Nobody is ever really held accountable. The British Government still will not even admit the true extent of its involvement with Scappaticci and other atrocities or similarly with the Dublin and Monaghan bombings. There are some very alarming things about this which I am surprised the Government does not highlight. The lawyers of the representatives of the victims of many of the Dublin and Monaghan bombings indicated that MI5 broke into the Denton headquarters while its review was being conducted. That is incredible. Even after all of this, after all of the atrocities, the collusion and the complicity with this kind of dirty tricks stuff, the report was leaked. Who leaked it? Then we have MI5 trying to break into the headquarters of Denton, the body set up to do this. That is just shocking.”
“We know the report indicates that the Dublin and Monaghan bombings - the single biggest atrocity - were carried out by loyalist paramilitaries with the collusion of the British state. The report dealing with that atrocity is still not published and now is in limbo because it is subject to legal action because of the leak. That is why it has not been published when it was supposed to be published. After years of investment the families put into that process, co-operating with Denton, they are now denied the truth and justice they have been seeking for decades. They have no idea now and are left in limbo as to whether they will ever get the truth, justice and accountability. The signs are that they are not going to because is that not the pattern we see? The families of the Bloody Sunday victims got no real truth and accountability.”
“They still have not got the truth and accountability they demanded from the British state because it wants to guarantee impunity and to protect the people guilty of atrocities that its agents carry out. Critically, in all of this, and this is the point I really want to make, while Operation Denton, the sort of subdivision of Kenova, is mentioned, there is far less focus from the Government on the fact that the Denton report has not been published. The families of the 34 victims of the Dublin and Monaghan bombings are absolutely furious about this because it was leaked in October two months before it was due to published. Now, who leaked it? As a result of that, it has still not been published.”
“The republican movement has questions to answer for sure but I find it interesting that the Irish Government's entire focus in this debate seems to be to score political points against Sinn Féin rather than to be concerned about the profound implications of the fact that the British state was running an agent like Scappaticci who was involved in killing and abducting people. He was protected. The Kenova report reveals the British state's protection of him led to far more deaths than any it might have claimed he was saving by running an agent within the IRA. It still refuses to really own up to the truth of its involvement in all of this, or even to name Scappaticci, in the same way as the victims of the atrocity in Derry on Bloody Sunday are still fighting for justice.”
“To my mind, there is a direct line between the complicity and collusion of the British state and the British Empire with the genocide we have witnessed in Gaza over the past two years and the atrocities that were carried out by its agents, like Freddie Scappaticci committing murder, abducting people and so on while he was a British agent, through to Bloody Sunday and the Dublin and Monaghan bombings, and, if we want to, we can go right back and draw parallels with the role of the Auxiliaries and the Black and Tans during the Irish Revolution and the very same people being sent to Palestine to back to the Zionist move to partition Palestine. What is the common link? The link is the British Empire being involved in atrocity.”
“Everybody knows it. The money has not been allocated to put in a gully which would allow the seawater to flow back out again. I agree with a lot in this motion but I think Deputy Tóibín should reconsider the criticisms he made of forecasting by Met Éireann and orange weather warnings, given what he is now saying. I do not agree that submissions on flood protection schemes should be limited to people who have a material interest or are locally based. Should experts on flood defences and climatology, for example, not have the right to put in a submission? Of course they should. Part of the problem is that we are not listening to the experts or Met Éireann. We should start listening to them.”
“Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown Council received hundreds of calls because of flooding in Newtownsmith, along the DART lines and so on. I thank the council workers, both the indoor council workers and the outdoor teams, who had to go out and respond to this. It highlights the chronic underfunding of our local authorities. Ireland is at the lowest level of funding in the European league table by a mile due to the underfunding of outdoor crews and local authorities generally. For decades, we have identified the problem of floodwater, rainwater and seawater mixing with sewerage in our area when the rains come in. The infrastructure has not been put in and the money has not been forthcoming. In Newtownsmith, where there was massive flooding, a gully was taken out about three decades ago. That is the reason all of Newtownsmith was flooded.”
“As I said, there were 13,000 applications for asylum. Do Members know how many tourists came here in 2024? There were 6 million. Is anybody running around saying we have to stop the tourists coming in because they are such a problem? No, because we all recognise they bring economic benefits even if they also rely on the infrastructure and so on. That exact argument applies to a far smaller number of people seeking asylum or to immigrants coming into this country. We should stop the scapegoating and leaning into the far right and the toxic politics of Trump.”