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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“The starting point of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and the fact that equal access to education is a right for children regardless of disability or additional needs was brought into very sharp focus recently with the Government's move to reduce the number of special needs assistants in many schools and the explosion of anger from school communities that caused. The Government has responded to that explosion, but it highlights something that is terribly important, which is the need to listen to those who are impacted by our decisions and by whether the systems we have and the resources we allocate are adequate to actually ensure the quality we profess to try to achieve in terms of delivering equal access to education.”
“I commend Deputy Quinlivan and the committee on producing a very good report. I have not read it all yet, but I have read a fair bit of it and it seems like an important piece of work. Well done to them all. I am not a member of the committee but it is an important issue. I have a particular reason I want to raise a specific issue with the Minister of State in relation to people's access to education and special needs assistance and I will get to it in a minute.”
“If this report is true, and it needs to be checked, there are 22 apartments earmarked for social housing sitting empty in an apartment complex off the Stillorgan Road. Will the Taoiseach look into this as a matter or urgency? I have written to the CEO of Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council. This kind of thing just cannot go on.”
“It is an absolute scandal that we have tens of thousands of vacant properties in this country while people face homelessness and the effects of the housing crisis. I ask the Taoiseach to look into something I became aware of this week. I have written to Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council about it. I received a tip-off from a very credible source that there are 22 apartments in an apartment complex off the Stillorgan Road that were handed over for Part V social housing three years ago but have been sitting empty ever since. Those 22 apartments are empty while families are being sent from Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown into homeless hostels in the city and thousands of people have been on the housing waiting list for years.”
“I am involved with a coalition of Palestine advocacy groups, anti-war groups and others who are planning protests around the forthcoming EU Presidency, particularly around the shameful, inexcusable complicity of the European Union as an institution and as individual states with Israel's ongoing genocidal crimes against the Palestinian people. Would people not be right to protest? Can the Taoiseach explain how it is in any way acceptable that any states across Europe, including our State, continue to do business, trade and in some cases are involved in arms going to Israel? As we know, €20 million worth of dual-use exports from this country went to the IDF.”
“I have repeatedly asked for statements in the House about the use of Shannon Airport by the US military and about the use of our airspace to transport weapons to Israel while it continues to slaughter people in Gaza. Every single day, people are being murdered by the Israelis in Gaza, and we have very likely facilitated some of that either through the US military using our airports-----”
“They are going to end up on the streets homeless. The Government has achieved a performative act of pointing the finger at them, setting them up as somehow a problem that has to be managed, fuelling and giving ground and concessions to the sort of people who are engaging in pogroms in the North at the moment. To be honest, that is what I think the Government is up to here. I do not really see, other than that, the reasons for this legislation. I am deeply concerned about what the Government is doing. We will have more detailed questions on Committee Stage about all of this. The Minister of State did not even accept many of the recommendations put forward by the joint committee on how this legislation should be processed, which begs serious questions about what the real agenda behind it is.”
“It is not happening but there is an implication that maybe it is and therefore we have to tighten it up. The consequence may be that vulnerable people will be excluded from emergency accommodation or even potentially from eligibility for social housing because one person in the household does not quite meet the criteria, even though everybody else has met the criteria such as children, including vulnerable children, people who are victims of human trafficking and so on may be deemed ineligible. As I understand it, the Government is going to table amendments on the next Stage, which could mean the eligibility thresholds required for social housing could then be applied to access to emergency accommodation. Where are the people who are deemed ineligible or cannot gain access to emergency accommodation going to go?”
“It will be just a little easier for landlords to evict people when they should not be allowed to evict people at all in the midst of a homelessness crisis. The Government claims that nobody is going to be excluded from social housing eligibility who was previously eligible for it but, in actuality, as multiple organisations, including Mercy Law, IHREC and so on, are saying, the Bill may well result in that. In any event, there is a performative element to it because what it is saying is there is a problem we need to tighten up on here, suggesting that people who are not eligible and do not have a right to social housing might be getting it, so we have to tighten it up. That certainly is not happening. Asylum seekers are not being housed in social housing.”
“Nobody is talking about that. It is an absolute scandal. On a site that is publicly owned, where we should have 100% social and affordable housing, we are only going to get 20% social and affordable housing because the Government has decided to sell it off and somebody is going to profiteer from it. That is why we have a housing crisis. The Government is looking after people who are profiteering from the inadequate supply of the most basic thing in the world - an affordable, secure roof over one's head. Even in this Bill, it is doing things to benefit landlords and to make it ever so slightly easier, for example, to evict people. Technical problems with termination notices will not longer be a reason to stop an eviction.”
“There seems to be no apparent rationale for this because this is about rationing access to something there should not be a shortage of. That is essentially what this Bill is about. There should not be a shortage of housing. There should not be a shortage of social and affordable housing. There should not be homelessness, yet what this Bill is about is about rationing access to something that there should not be a shortage of because it should be a basic right. Of course, it is a handy way to deflect from the Government's own responsibility. The oldest trick in the book and in politics generally is, "Watch what my right hand is doing so you don't see what my left hand is doing." This week I tried to highlight the fact that Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown is selling off land zoned for 1,000 homes on publicly owned land to private developers.”
“It is leaning into that stuff because the truth is we have a shortage of housing and a catastrophic housing crisis not because of immigrants coming into this country, but because of a Government that has failed for more than a decade to address the housing crisis and to deliver the social and affordable housing necessary to address it and to deal with the homelessness crisis that continues to escalate. The Government has leant into the narrative that somehow it is because there are too many people rather than it has not provided enough social and affordable housing or it has failed to take measures that would prevent people ending up homeless. That leads into the racist narrative being pushed by the far right, which ends in the sort of stuff we have seen in the past few weeks.”
“There is support from really vile political forces on the far right from those countries. How is that all connected to what we are discussing here? We have got to stand up against that. The Government, and political forces that have any sense of decency, should not in any way lean into narratives that suggest that because someone is an immigrant or a person of colour, somehow he or she is a threat or something to be feared or that he or she is a problem for our society. We must not in any way lean into a narrative that can lead to that sort of stuff. That is what the Government is doing.”
“We have horrific instances of organised crime in this country where people are chopped up by criminals and so on. There is revulsion and horror but it does not generally lead to attacks on people who have nothing to do with that, and generalisations, but in the context of the North, it has fuelled racist pogroms against people of colour and migrants because the alleged perpetrator of that horrific assault was an immigrant. Certain political forces on the far right, who also coincidentally tend to be supporters of the Israeli regime, which I will just throw that in for good measure, who seem to get a lot of support online from the United States and Britain and so on for their targeting of immigrants and for whipping up hatred, fear and hostility and horrific, violent pogroms against immigrants.”
“We have a horrific attack taking place in Belfast, which should be utterly condemned. The perpetrator of that attack should be brought to justice. People are rightly horrified by what happened. Of course, our sympathy goes out to the victim of this terrible attack, but we have also seen how it has then resulted in horrific attacks on people who happen to be immigrants and people of colour in the North. Houses are being burnt out and vile, vicious racist attacks are taking place against people purely on the basis that they are deemed to be immigrants or people of colour who had nothing whatsoever to do with the attack. Horrific things happen all the time. As a lot of people have been highlighting, in the North we have horrific instances of violence against women where they are killed as a result of domestic violence.”
“The Government narrative on this Bill is that it is largely a technical Bill that is going to put on a statutory footing what is already the practice in terms of eligibility criteria on residency and habitual residency for social housing. It is just technical and it is a tidying-up exercise, providing a little bit more efficiency for decisions of the RTB in the second instance. There is nothing to see here and nothing to be concerned about. That begs the question: why we are doing it? What is the rationale for this? As has been asked, why is the Minister doing it if we are not really doing much anyway, and why is there such a big rush to do it? That begs pretty serious questions. I have to ask that question in the context of what has happened up in the North this week because, sadly, I am afraid these things have become connected.”
“When I asked the question about the purpose of sanctions against Russia, the Government said: "It was with the aim of weakening Russia's economic base, depriving it of critical technologies and markets, and significantly curtailing its ability to wage war." In other words, the Government did not just sanction the occupied territories of Ukraine; it sanctioned the Russian regime's ability to sustain its war effort and that occupation. That is what we should be doing if we are serious about dealing with the illegal occupation of the occupied territories. We should sanction the regime that is underwriting that in total but the Government will not do that because it does not have a problem with the Israeli regime and it is just gaslighting the Irish public about its real intentions.”
“The Government does not want to have any impact. That is why it has excluded services on the completely dishonest basis that they are too complicated. I can give a solution to dealing with the complexities of services that does not involve gutting the Bill but in fact could make it have a real impact. We should impose sanctions not just in the occupied territories but all across the board against the Israeli regime. That would solve the complexity. We just would not do business in goods or services or any business whatsoever with the Israeli regime because the state is underwriting, orchestrating and enforcing the occupation of the Palestinian territories.”
“The Government is engaged in the most cynical exercise to try to convey to the public the idea that it wants to sanction Israel for its obscene crimes against the Palestinian people while actually making sure that no serious sanction whatsoever is imposed. The Government wants to dance to the tune of corporations that profit from their involvement with Israel and from states that continue to arm and support the State of Israel while it is committing its genocidal crimes. That is why the Government does not want to do anything. Against a background where we have €4 billion worth of goods coming from the Israeli regime into this country, we end up with a Bill that may impact on €200,000 worth of vegetables and a few goods from a few settlements in the West Bank, which will have no impact whatsoever, but that is the point.”
“He played hurling while he was here. He met the President. It was such a beautiful thing. His life was extinguished along with hundreds of other young people playing football by a regime that treats young Palestinians playing football and young children as snakes to be wiped out. That is the psychosis of the Israeli regime and that is why it must not be normalised. The idea of normalising it by playing a game of football against a state that does that to children is disgusting. The Government should support the boycott and stop the game.”
“Otherwise, more snakes will be raised." That was his attitude and he became a minister after saying that. That is the altitude of the Israeli regime towards Palestinian children that has led it to kill more than 350 children who play football in the past three years, more than 1,000 mostly young people who play sports of various kinds. One of those children was a young man called Muhammad Khalifa. I was very proud to be part of organising one leg of soccer events involving Muhammad Khalifa's team, Al-Hilal in Gaza. They played in Ballybrack as well as elsewhere in the country. He was aged 12 the time in 2016. A decade later, he was massacred along with seven members of his family and his brother. He had gone on to play for the Palestinian national youth team and he was wiped out by an Israeli attack which wiped out his entire family.”
“I love football. I have played football since I was aged five. One of the things I love about football is it is young people all over the world playing the beautiful game, doing something beautiful. What Israel is doing to Palestinian children is the very antithesis of what football is about because it is ugly, murderous and genocidal. A very significant part of Israel’s decades-long genocidal campaign against the Palestinians is its desire to murder Palestinian children, including the children who play football. Back in 2015, more than a decade ago, I read out a quote from among many from ministers. One particularly stuck out by Ayelet Shaked, a Knesset MP who later became minister for justice, talking about Palestinian children. He said, "They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes.”
“By the not-for-profit company that provides services to the HSE. I met some of these other workers, doing the same thing. There are thousands of these people, all across the country, on poverty pay rates, who did not get the pay increase that other section 39 workers got. They are very angry and it is not fair. There should not be pay apartheid for home care workers.”
“Tomorrow, there is another protest by Northside Home Care Services workers who have been engaging in a series of one-day protests and strikes over the fact that they did not benefit from the pay increases arising from the section 39 Workplace Relations Commission decision on pay restoration. Many of these workers used to be paid on a par with HSE workers. Now, they are on rates barely above the minimum wage. There are thousands of them. This is one group of 80. Their shop steward has been disciplined because of their engagement in the process and suspended.”
“The idea that it is being sold off to private developers who are then going to build housing that nobody can afford is a scandal.”
“I asked the Taoiseach about what I consider to be the absolutely disgraceful decision of DLR Properties, which is a corporate subsidiary of Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council, to put up for sale land zoned for more than 1,000 houses. We could have more than 1,000 social and affordable homes but instead a board, which is not accountable to the elected representatives on Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council or to the public but is populated by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael councillors, has decided to sell off public land. I asked the Taoiseach about it last week. I would like to know because this is disgraceful. I thought all publicly-owned land that could be available for social and affordable housing was supposed to be made available, for example, to the LDA.”
“The Government is speaking out of both sides of its mouth on the question of sanctions against Israel over its crimes against the Palestinians. It will not support the boycott, it is gutting the occupied territories Bill so it will effectively have no serious impact, and it wants to impose a guillotine on the debate tomorrow because it does not want to be exposed. There is a guillotine on the occupied territories Bill, and we have had this confirmed by the Ceann Comhairle. The Government is not allowing the many Members who would want to contribute to the debate about imposing sanctions on Israel and how the Government is gutting that Bill in the way it is. Please drop the guillotine and allow for a proper debate on that Bill.”
“I believe hundreds of workers in RTÉ are balloting for industrial action because of their concerns about this. Where will the RTÉ orchestra going to live? I could say more.”
“I am against public service broadcasting, decent quality employment and training and indeed the wider public interest being thrown out because of the bad behaviour of a small group of people, which could have been dealt with by imposing a cap and everybody being placed on salary scales that are transparent. The salary scales and the pay, employment and training conditions of people in the private sector - that independent sector - will not be transparent. Who is going to be checking on them? It will not happen. All that money will just go out and we will have no control whatsoever. It is not benefiting the public, it is not generating public service broadcasting and it is not generating quality employment and training - very much the opposite - so I am very concerned.”
“A Gordon Ramsay cooking show was made a couple of years ago down in Wicklow. Did it benefit from public money? Will the independent sector benefit - because that was made by the independent sector - now that 25% of RTÉ money has to go to these people, the producers? An awful lot of the stuff that is made here is getting section 481 money or Screen Ireland money and now it is going to get RTÉ money. Screen Producers Ireland, which is the representative group of the independent sector, has for quite a number of years been getting hundreds of thousands of euro from RTÉ - private companies. This looks to me like the hollowing-out of public service broadcasting using the excuse of bad governance and bad behaviour by a small group of people at the top. I am against that. I am against throwing out the baby with the bathwater.”
“It looks to me like the bits in RTÉ that were making money are being asset-stripped out and decent jobs for ordinary people are now going to be thrown into this private sector where there is no oversight.”
“This is happening simultaneously when section 481, the film tax credit, which was previously for the scripted sector because it contributed to developing an industry and producing stuff in relation to Irish culture, is now going in the independent sector to stuff that does not necessarily do any of those things. I was reading an article a while ago about Gordon Ramsay's cooking show being produced in the independent sector. What does Gordon Ramsay have to do with public service broadcasting? It is Gordon Ramsay or US quiz shows. Is that contributing to Irish culture? Are they going to benefit from tax breaks and money coming in that was supposed to go to public service broadcasting? Is that where this is going?”
“Will they get on to the next gig? They not if they complain about the hours. I mentioned a report to the Minister. Screen Guilds of Ireland did a survey, which it never published because the responses of the people who worked in the sector were so bad that it looked bad for the industry. It never published it because it was all about the long hours, poor pay, no career progression, how people were never listened to and how it was understaffed and under-resourced. It was absolutely damning, so it was never published. That was done a couple of years ago. Is this what is going to happen to people who are working in the independent sector where more money is going to go?”
“It is very pleased and very happy with the requirement in this legislation that 25% of all the money of RTÉ is going to go to it as well as the money it gets paid to run its organisation in a situation where nobody has a job in that sector and where workers are fighting to get proper employment because it is gig to gig. We have gone from people having jobs in RTÉ to this and just to reiterate, these are the workers who did not have obscene salaries whose jobs are being replaced. I am absolutely for capping the salaries of the top people in RTÉ; they were obscene. However, it is the jobs of the ordinary people - the crew, the camera operators and all these people - that are going to be replaced with people who will now work gig to gig. They will go from proper jobs into the gig economy. They will be totally vulnerable.”
“I think it is still going on, and maybe the Minister of State can clarify it. Certainly, a few years ago, about €400,000 or more was being paid by RTÉ to Screen Producers Ireland, which is the representative group of the private companies in the independent audiovisual sector, that is, the producer companies. Why is public money going to run a representative organisation of a series of private companies? I do not understand that. I do not think public money goes to IBEC, does it? I do not think so, unless I missed something. However, it is going to the screen producer equivalent of IBEC - I think that is been going on - which is very pleased about the commitment. I got its document.”
“This is not PAYE employment, so they will not be paying PAYE tax anymore. If they were doing that job in RTÉ and if those productions were being made in-house in RTÉ, they would be paying tax and they would have some job security. Now, once it is in the independent sector and privately owned, who is going to make sure it is not bogus self-employment? From what I hear, it is rampant. Basically, people will not get to work in that sector unless they agree to set themselves up as a private company. Therefore, individuals, whether they are plasterers, riggers or whatever it might be, have to set themselves up as individual private companies, so they are not employees. By the way, as well as getting money it seems from RTÉ, there is another source of money, which is interesting in and of itself.”
“They paid tax, had pensions and so on. Some people were treated very badly and there was some route to try to resolve that and reclassify people who had been bogusly self-employed. What is happening in the independent sector in terms of employment for workers? What is going to happen is that proper paid jobs for crew in RTÉ are going to be progressively replaced by people in the independent sector. My understanding from talking to people is that the producers, that is, the members of Screen Producers Ireland, SPI, are basically telling people that if they want to work on their productions, whether they are scripted or non-scripted - a lot of the new stuff is going to be in the non-scripted sector - but in either case, these individuals will be told they have to set themselves up as private companies.”
“Yes. That is something that was public and where we had some oversight of it. There was some accountability. It went to a private company and then ended up in the hands of vulture funds, and a huge fortune was made in the meantime. There was no transparency around any of that. We had no real control over it or no oversight. That is what is going to happen, in my opinion, slowly but surely to public service broadcasting. This is an example of the requirement to outsource to the independent sector. Who is going to check what the salaries are for the producers in the independent sector? Who is going to ensure there is not bogus self-employment, something we know was an element of what was going on in RTÉ with the disgraceful treatment of workers in there? By and large, however, most people have proper jobs.”
“Olcott got hold of what had been the national film studios and the remaining 32% Government stake. It gave commitments at the time, and some of us expressed concern about this, that it was committed to the people who were employed there and so on. I raised this at the time with the Comptroller and Auditor General, by the way. I went in and met him. In 2021, Olcott, headed up by Siún Ní Raghallaigh and a guy called Joe Devine, sold Ardmore for €100 million to Hackman Capital Partners and Square Mile Capital Management, which were US-based consortiums. There still is not full clarity on how much the State actually got for the 32% because it was writing off debts and so on for Ardmore. A lot of money had gone into Ardmore through section 41 and so on. I think it was in the region of €6 million.”
“Let me give the Minister of State one example that is, in my opinion, kind of relevant. I will just set it out. I screamed about it at the time but, as usual with Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, I was just wasting my time. I refer to the sale of Ardmore Studios, which was the national film studios, back in 2018. The Government had a 32% stake in Ardmore Studios when it was sold to Olcott, a private consortium that also owned Troy Studios. If we remember, a lot of money for Troy Studios had come from Limerick County Council, I think. It was owned, if I remember correctly, although I stand to be corrected, by Michael Noonan's brother. It became Troy Studios and Olcott then bought Ardmore Studios, the 32% remaining stake. Ms Siún Ní Raghallaigh was the CEO. That name should ring a bell; she was in charge of RTÉ later.”
“There is no transparency once we outsource to the independent sector. Therefore, we will not know what is done with that money. If we think about it, and my worst fears are being realised, the bad behaviour and obscene salaries of a small group of people at the top of RTÉ means that the ordinary workers in RTÉ, who are in no way responsible for that bad behaviour, and public service broadcasting itself are going to be the collateral damage. That is what is actually happening here. The net result will be that more money will go into areas in broadcasting and in the audiovisual sector where there will be no oversight whatsoever, namely, the independent sector. What oversight is there going to be of the independent sector? What oversight is there when the State outsources stuff?”
“Some of us - me in particular - have been urging the Government to look at it and to have transparency, accountability and proper financial management, yet the Government does not do it. I do not believe this Bill is actually about achieving the things it says it is going to achieve. I think it is going to do the opposite of that. That is why I am going to be opposing it, despite the aspirations. Do not get me wrong, I am happy to have the Comptroller and Auditor General look at and audit of the accounts of RTÉ. That is fine; no problem. If the Bill was just about that, I would be in favour of it. What I am not in favour of is an obligation of a minimum of 25% of all the money that RTÉ is going to be given having to be outsourced to the private sector. It is a minimum, by the way. That is back-door privatisation.”
“I am against the legislation and I am a little surprised others have not stated their opposition to it. I urge people to consider opposing it. There are some good aspirations and aspects to it, which I would support. I am for greater transparency when it comes to the governance of RTÉ. I am for better financial management of RTÉ and of money put into public service broadcasting generally. I am also for more transparency - that is relevant to why I am against this Bill - and proper management of public funds going into the audiovisual sector, including the money to public service broadcasting but also the lots of money given to the audiovisual sector where there is no transparency.”
“That is all good and not a moment too soon. However, we know there is always a tension between budgetary constraints being imposed, the needs of the children and a genuine recognition of the importance and role of SNAs and what school communities really need. It is absolutely critical that the needs of children, a genuine recognition of the importance and role of the SNAs and what school communities need trump any budgetary pressures being imposed. The concern is that these delays and what happened the last time was ultimately driven by budgetary constraints, and it led to the sort of crisis we had. It is good we have had the conversations but let us hope people have genuinely been listened to and that there is no diluting happening for financial reasons, and that this does the job it needs to do for children, SNAs, teachers and schools.”
“All of this was reflected in the alternative proposed circular put forward by parents' groups. Obviously, teachers have to have input and have to teach. However, this has to be maximalist in terms of inclusion and genuinely recognise the importance and role of SNAs. Will it be?”
“It is coming out over the coming number of weeks. That is good. It happened because the Government got it so badly wrong. There were massive protests and there was fear and anxiety but it is good that we have moved on. The question is really whether it will be maximalist in terms of the need to include children and genuinely recognise the role of the SNAs and how it has evolved, and genuinely recognise what inclusion means. It is not just physical presence in the school. It is emotional well-being, genuine support and communication. Just because a child is doing well does not necessarily mean an SNA has to be taken out and moved somewhere else because a child who might need that support to continue flourishing could regress because they do not have SNA support.”
“We are all aware how the failure of the 2014 circular and the Government to recognise the evolved role of the SNA and what the meaning of inclusion in education really means led to in the crisis we had earlier this year. When will the promised new circular be out? I think I heard the Minister say it will come before the summer recess. Will she confirm this? Will it reflect the needs and aspirations of SNAs, school communities, parents and children?”
“I suggest that the Minister, as Minister with responsibility for infrastructure, cracks the whip and says that it is madness to let this thing go and that we should save that site and save The Complex for all the artists and the local community and to deliver social and affordable housing on the site.”
“This is the game of pass the parcel that led to The Complex being closed down. If one goes to the Department, it says that it would love to leave The Complex open but it cannot buy properties, which is something I did not know, so what the Minister just said is complete nonsense. The Department is not allowed to buy properties. Dublin City Council said basically it did not have the money for it. The Minister is the Minister for infrastructure. We need housing, social and affordable housing in particular, and we need arts and cultural spaces, which are being closed down left, right and centre in the city centre. That building has not been sold. Apparently, the sale has not gone through so it is not over yet. That space could be saved and we could get a site for social and affordable housing for the small figure of €6 million.”
“We would get a community, arts and cultural space, which we badly need, rather than allow it to be lost, and we would get social and affordable housing in the city centre for €6 million. Instead despite the promises of the Minister's predecessor to that community, it has been allowed to close down. By the way, it is not yet over, so it is something the Minister could reconsider.”