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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“Trump is now saying that the price of gaining support from the United States is that the Trump Administration wants to loot hundreds of millions of dollars worth of precious minerals from Ukraine. This is exposing the imperialist character of their intervention in all of this. It is a mistake for Ukraine to align itself with powers that are that cynical and that riddled with double standards. The double standard is most apparent when we think that the US, the UK, Germany and so on are simultaneously arming a power that has been guilty of a genocidal massacre against the people of Palestine and continue to support that apartheid, brutal regime and illegal occupation, the brutal persecution and oppression of the people of Palestine.”
“It is me, then Deputies Connolly and O'Gorman. The Putin regime's invasion of Ukraine was an absolutely brutal, unjustified, criminal action and he should get out. Putin should get out of Ukraine. The Ukrainian people have the absolute right to resist that brutal invasion and occupation. However, particularly the powers that dominate NATO, the US, Germany and the UK, are not reliable allies in supporting people who are resisting occupation and oppression. They are not motivated by a desire to support people who are resisting occupation or who are trying to defend principles of international law. That is the key point. The Ukrainian people have discovered that to their cost since Trump came into power.”
“Why would we trust it when it is involving us with the PESCO alliance, which is aligned with NATO and dominated by the US, the UK, France and Germany, some of the biggest imperial powers with brutal records of warmongering? Why would we trust it?”
“Whatever. They also, in their hundreds of thousands, protested about decisions of previous Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael Governments to allow millions of US troops to go through Shannon Airport to assist US-UK led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where hundreds of thousands of people were slaughtered on the basis of lies put out by the US. The coalition Government of which the Tánaiste was a member allowed that to happen. Why would we trust the Government when it had NATO generals overseeing our troops in Cork at least twice in the past couple of years? Why would we trust it when the Department of Defence has employed a US Pentagon-based contractor imbued with US values to redesign our Defence Forces?”
“The Minister wants to get rid of the triple lock so we can deploy Irish troops to get involved in conflicts headed up by military alliances dominated by the United States, Britain and Germany - people who are every bit potentially, and often in reality, as nasty as the Russians.”
“The point of the UN part of the triple lock is that we do not deploy troops in conflicts between the big imperial powers. The Minister is right: Putin is a nasty imperialist aggressor. However, is it not interesting that he does not call Trump a nasty imperialist aggressor when he has just said to the Ukrainians, "We might consider giving you a few weapons, but only if you give us all those raw materials in your country", or while he is trying to do a real estate deal on top of the broken bones and bodies of the victims of genocide in Gaza. The Minister does not mention him as an imperialist or the new German Chancellor who has invited Netanyahu, a wanted war criminal, to Germany which is also involved in NATO. He does not mention them and that is the truth of it.”
“I do not trust Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael with Irish neutrality. For example, the Department of Defence has just contracted a US defence agency based in the pentagon to redesign the Irish Defence Forces. In the blurb on its website, this US pentagon-based company says it is grounded in American values. Maybe they are the values of Donald Trump as he has shown in a video the Tánaiste may have seen about Gaza, with statues of Trump and dollar signs being made by Trump in Gaza. Should we trust Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, given that millions of US troops were allowed go through Shannon Airport, in a neutral country, to prosecute wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? The Government has involved us in PESCO and the EU militarisation project, which is in turn aligned with NATO, dominated by the United States, Germany and Britain.”
“The Government is waging a very thinly veiled stealth war against Irish neutrality. The move to remove the triple lock is part of that very conscious and deliberate campaign by this Government to undermine our traditional neutrality. Can the Tánaiste please explain why the Government is getting rid of the triple lock? Is it not clearly just a move to undermine Ireland's traditional neutrality and involve us in the wars of big powers?”
“Is the Government planning to have pre-legislative scrutiny of the Bill or is it planning to ram it through? Could we have a timeline and dates? Could we get a commitment that there will not be an attempt to impose a guillotine?”
“There certainly is a delay with the committees and the business of the House is being stalled because of that. That is solely the responsibility of the Government for trying to overstep the mark of all previous convention and trying to muddy the waters between the Government and the Opposition for its own advantage, and to neuter the Opposition. It is not good enough for it to have a majority, to control the Dáil schedule and to have a majority on all committees; it also wants to populate the Opposition benches and quieten the voice of the Opposition. I want to ask about one specific Bill, namely, the Defence (Amendment) (No. 2) Bill, by means of which the Government is planning to get rid of the triple lock and launch an attack on our neutrality. When will it come to the House?”
“I want to deal briefly with the issue of the notes of the counselling sessions. This is one observation on top of the other ones. Are this issue and the low numbers of people taking cases not connected? A tiny number of victims of gender-based violence actually go to the State to seek justice precisely because of things like that. Why would they if the notes used in counselling and therapy could be handed over and then made public? It is an active disincentive to seek justice or to seek the therapy someone needs after the traumatising experience of being a victim of such violence.”
“I suspect those 12 could be in my area of Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown, which is one of the counties that did not have any refuge space at all up to very recently and where the Istanbul Convention would require 48 places just in that county. There was a recommendation for 24 but what we have actually got is 12. Of course, they are massively oversubscribed. There is no prioritisation for women suffering domestic violence when they have to leave their home and find themselves homeless. I have even had cases of women who went into a refuge and were then evicted from the refuge after a number of months and put into emergency accommodation. If that is the sort of signal the State sends out about how much it cares about the victims of this violence, it hardly sends a good signal about the seriousness of the State to deal with it.”
“However, our statistics are some of the worst in Europe and testify to the failure of successive Governments and our society to deal with such absolutely toxic, poisonous, dangerous and criminal violence against women, LGBT people and people based on their gender. It is absolutely horrendous. The State does not exactly send out a good signal on the way we deal with people who have been victims of that violence, as has been referred to by others. The Minister of State sort of boasted about the 12 additional refuge places last year, which is a pitiful number, against a background where we are not even close to meeting the Istanbul Convention targets.”
“That more than one third of them have suffered that violence at the hands of a partner is absolutely horrendous and frightening. The fact that one in four LGBT people have suffered abuse and violence and that 72% of LGBT people suffer verbal abuse is horrendous. The Natashia O'Brien case summed it up. A 24-year-old woman walking down the street, who intervened on behalf of somebody who was being subjected to homophobic abuse then herself got violently assaulted in public by somebody who did it in a way where they thought it was acceptable, then had to fight for some kind of justice in terms of the response of the State to that horrendous situation. I hear others referring to this. We often hear - rightly so in some cases - about the treatment of women in other cultures and so on.”
“I thank Deputy Coppinger for bringing forward the motion. As others have, I pay tribute to those in the Public Gallery for coming here today and for having the courage to speak up, and to advocate and campaign on this issue. Their presence is hugely important because listening to the Government and some of the contributions here, they might think that there is a very clear determination to address the scourge of gender-based violence. However, the facts as outlined in the motion and repeated by some of our contributors suggest that the Government is a long way from taking the actions necessary to address this shameful, horrendous and frightening situation. That is what these figures are. The fact that more than half of women have suffered sexual violence either as a child or as an adult is absolutely shocking.”
“I have to wonder, given the fact that the Government has been misleading the public about its recruitment strategy in the health service, telling the public and this House repeatedly that it is trying to recruit people but is finding it difficult to recruit them, and then I discover when talking to health workers that the health service is not trying to recruit them at all because there is a thing called pay in numbers, which means the Government is telling different sections of the health service that they are not allowed recruit people when they need them. I have to wonder whether it is just the same here in something as basic as testing people to drive so that they can get their licence when often their jobs or critical parts of their existence depend on it. It is pretty pathetic and the Government should implement this motion.”
“However, my waiting time has continuously been pushed back. First, I was informed I would receive an invitation to book my test in October, which then got delayed to January. Now I have been told I must wait until April 28th just to select a date, which likely will be scheduled for late May or early June. If all goes well, it will have been an entire year since I registered - far from the promised ten-week turnaround outlined by the Minister for Transport. Another constituent who wrote to me on 22 February put it very well and very succinctly: I am currently on a waiting list of 39+ weeks for my first-time driving test. That is nine months: a full human gestation period. That is well put. The answer of course, is very basic, which is to recruit enough people to do the testing.”
“I have had no luck finding alternative arrangements in Dublin, so come December 31st, at the age of 29, I will have to move in with my grandmother in Tipperary and commute to work. I will need to commute to work daily, and for that I will need - from Tipperary to Dún Laoghaire - my full driver's licence rather than a provisional. However, the wait times are abhorrent. I am currently on the waiting list and it is estimated that I will only receive my invitation to book a slot for the test in September of next year. From November to the following September. is quite incredible. Nothing has changed, however. Another constituent wrote to me earlier this month: I originally applied for my driving test in June 2024, with the expectation based on official guidance that I would be able to sit the test within ten weeks.”
“I thank Sinn Féin and Deputy Daly for bringing this motion forward, which we are happy to support. I heard somebody say Tallaght was the worst in terms of the waiting list. I was reported in the middle of last year that Dún Laoghaire was the worst, so we are competing for that accolade. Certainly, waiting times for tests and resits in Dún Laoghaire are shockingly bad. They have not improved, as I took the trouble to look through emails I received in recent years, and what is evident from them is that nothing has improved for quite some time. One constituent wrote to me, and this is an interesting overlap of other failures by the Government, and indeed, by a Minister who has moved from housing to transport. In November 2023, a constituent wrote: My housemates and I have recently received a no-fault eviction notice.”
“It is an absolute disgrace that the people who provide these vital supports and services, simply because they happen to work for a charitable organisation to which the Government has outsourced a public service, are paid less, have worse pay and conditions, do not get pay increases in some cases for years and do not have pay parity with those in the public service. That issue must be addressed as a matter of absolute urgency.”
“Such is their frustration, such is the failure of the Government agencies and Departments that are supposed to vindicate the rights of children to respond to these parents that they have been forced to take this step. It is an absolute disgrace. Even now, the Government should be forestalling the need for those parents to take that action this Friday by guaranteeing their children the supports and school places they need. The second issue I will raise in the brief time available to me is the people who work providing supports and services for people with special needs or disability in section 39 organisations.”
“A group of 54 parents of children with special needs will be outside the Department of Education at 1 p.m. this Friday to fight for their children's right, which the Government is failing to vindicate, to have a school place with the special education resources and supports they need. It is bad enough to have to fight for the right of one's children to have a school place which the Government is failing to vindicate, but parents have all the additional stresses that relate to fighting for children with special needs. They will now be doing a 24-hour sleep-out around the clock outside the Department of Education next Friday. That is what the Government has forced them to do.”
“There is also the fact that an Irish MEP and other MEPs on an EU delegation on a pre-organised visit by representatives of the EU to Israel have been deported. Israel is given favoured trade status by the EU and then an EU delegation goes to Israel, they are not allowed in and are deported because they criticised the Israeli Government for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. Does the Taoiseach agree this is a pretty serious crisis in terms of the foreign policy, the ethical stand, the commitment to human rights and international law facing the European Union? Has he any comments?”
“It seems to me that there is a crisis in terms of the EU's commitment to even its own human rights legislation and to international law. The newly elected Chancellor of Germany has invited Benjamin Netanyahu to Germany. This is somebody who has an arrest warrant out for him by the ICC for genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and the new German Chancellor is inviting him to Germany. Now, that is very serious because Germany is one of the most important countries in the EU and basically what it is saying is that it does not give a damn about international law, about human rights or the crimes for which the ICC has indicted Benjamin Netanyahu. It is giving two fingers to international law. That poses a pretty serious problem for the EU.”
“That is the real explanation for why we cannot address the trolley crisis, why there are waiting lists of nearly 1 million people for treatment, and why, for example, we do not have enough public health nurses now to do important developmental checks on young infants. This is all because the Government is preventing health areas and hospitals from being able to recruit the staff they need to actually meet patient need. Will the Taoiseach scrap the pay and numbers strategy so that we do not end up with strikes in this country by health workers being used to break through this embargo?”
“The Taoiseach was caught out misleading the public, to put it kindly, on the housing completion numbers to try to win an election. Will he now admit that the crisis in our health service is also another area where he has been misleading the public about what is actually going on with regard to the lack of staffing across the health services? This has prompted all of the health workers unions to ballot overwhelmingly for industrial action. This includes nurses, midwives, porters and other grades, together with medical scientists and laboratory assistants, who are all balloting for industrial action over the pay and numbers strategy, which is a backdoor embargo on recruitment in vital areas of the health service.”
“Such is the overwhelming effect of rain on the pumping station off the west pier in Dún Laoghaire, it is unable to pump the foul water up to the treatment plant in Ringsend and, therefore, people cannot swim because foul water is all over Dublin Bay. This happens at short notice. This needs to be addressed. It has been flagged. There is no testing of the water outside the swimming season from May to September even though people swim in the winter months. It needs to be urgently addressed to have this decrepit water infrastructure rehabilitated so we do not have Dublin Bay full of foul water.”
“Due to the Victorian decrepit water infrastructure in much of my area - this is probably true of much of the city, but it is certainly true of Dún Laoghaire - when it rains, the run-off water mixes with foul water and the foul water all goes into the pumping station in Dún Laoghaire, which cannot cope and therefore foul water goes into the sea, destroying water quality and making the sea in Dublin bay unsafe for swimming. This happens all the time when it rains too heavily because of the failure of successive Governments to put the necessary investment into rehabilitating the decrepit Victorian water infrastructure.”
“-----taking up its speaking time, committee places and resources. This is clearly an effort to minimise the ability of the Opposition to scrutinise the Government. Another example of that is that this week for the third time, every single week, instead of two appearances by the Taoiseach at Taoiseach's Questions, he will appear only once this week. The fact that it is not a coincidence is confirmed by the Government's submission on Dáil reform where it is looking to reduce Taoiseach's Questions to one day a week.”
“Otherwise, we will get a race to the bottom and a repeat of this kind of thing. Proactive action by the Government to prevent this happening in the future would be very useful.”
“Let us be clear, their strike action, the actions of their union and the fact the matter was raised in this House all put pressure on BIMM to come to the table. It had previously refused to go to the WRC. There is a serious issue here, especially as the workers were working under the auspices of TUD. Essentially, TUD had outsourced this degree to a private company. That contract will be up for renewal in a couple of years. I would ask the Department to talk to colleagues in other Departments, particularly the Department of higher education, and say that it should be a condition of tenders that those tendering would guarantee decent pay and conditions and not allow outsourcing to create yellow-pack grades of pay and conditions for people working in higher education.”
“This was achieved through their own efforts. Under no circumstances should workers anywhere, but particularly where they are employed under the auspices of TUD, be made redundant and then asked to reapply for their own jobs.”
“That is very interesting. I was not aware the Minister of State was notified. Due to the three days of strike action and the representations of IFUT, the workers' union, it looks as if BIMM has made concessions which it is hoped are satisfactory to the workers. The context here is that 53 workers were told they were going to be made redundant but not because their jobs were gone. They were going to have to reapply for their own jobs but on lesser pay and conditions, with the creation of a new freelance grade to replace jobs which had a more formal arrangement. I am glad to say the workers have won but they should not have had to go out on strike for three days. It looks as if all compulsory redundancies are off the table now, there will be a system of career progression and some pay increases for workers.”
“Last week in the Dáil I raised the plight of teachers in the British and Irish Modern Music Institute, which provides degree courses for TUD in commercial modern music. At that point, 53 of them had been threatened with redundancy and were told they would have to reapply for their own jobs and would be facing big cuts in their pay and conditions. Their union and their strike action have now established some sort of deal which will be balloted on. However, it raises serious questions about how workers in higher education could be treated in this way.”
“Control of this technology must be used to benefit ordinary working people and we must not have a government led by people who are making vast profits out of this technology and who do not give a damn about the future of our planet or about working people.”
“Imagine the people who set up that company using that name for the company. When setting up that company, they knew what they were doing and that it was for evil purposes. Why else would they name the company after the all-seeing eye of the dark lord Sauron? Unfortunately, there are a lot of these people in the world. They do not care about the benefits to society. They certainly do not care about workers. Artists, performers, writers, directors and so on are rightly very worried about what is already happening in the arts industry. Essentially, copies of them are being made. They are being moved out of the process and replaced with machines that use their avatars to produce art, writing and so on. While this technology is controlled by people who are only interested in profit, I will be deeply suspicious about it.”
“There is a Deputy elected to this House who had to be suspended from his party because he was associated with, and a shareholder in, a company called Palantir that was providing digital technology to kill people and identify so-called terrorists for the US and Israeli militaries. One of the things I thought people should consider about this company is its name. We know digital technology can benefit people but, in this case, it was used to target people and kill them, including during the genocide in Palestine over the past year and a half. The name of the company, Palantir, which should have rung a few alarm bells, comes from The Lord of the Rings . It is the seeing stone of the dark lord Sauron, who is the evil character. It is used to see everything and manipulate people to the benefit of the dark lord.”
“Most technology can be used either to benefit human beings or for malign purposes. I do not trust the people who control this technology, or the people who dominate the political scene in most of the world, to use this technology to the benefit of society. One of the best films ever made in my opinion - if you have not watched it, you should - is Charlie Chaplin's "Modern Times", in which he brilliantly satirises the impact of Fordist industrial technology to deepen the exploitation of human beings, and turn human beings into machines purely to be exploited by greedy capitalists. The danger he alluded to in that brilliant film remains with us today.”
“Vital bus routes and public transport services should not only run if a private company can make a profit out of them. A private company, Aircoach, has just announced that it is going to cut several routes, including one that goes through my area. The cut means there will no longer be a route going from Shankill, Ballybrack and Loughlinstown to Dublin Airport. Bus drivers in my area are telling me that the No. 7 route is possibly to be handed over to Go-Ahead Ireland. That is a company that made losses last year and is failing to fulfil its contract to provide routes all over the place. Incredibly, it will be rewarded with one of the best routes that Dublin Bus has. This stuff has to stop. Privatisation of public transport is a failure. We need to put in place a service to the airport because it is a necessary public good.”
“They have an interest in making sure it does not happen. That is the problem. It is summed up for me by a number of developments in my area. Niche Living is a co-living development on Eblana Avenue in Dún Laoghaire. We campaigned for social and affordable housing. We got a co-living development. It is now being advertised on booking.com for €1,000 a week for tourists. St. Helen's Court is an apartment block across from my office. Most of it has been empty for seven or eight years. They have evicted all the tenants and it is owned by vulture funds. They sit on it, waiting to evict the tenants, ramp up the value of the asset and then flip it on. That is who the Government is representing. It is not representing ordinary people. We need a revolution in this country on the issue of housing because you lot do not care.”
“The sooner the people in this country who care about it and are affected by it realise that that is why we have had over a decade of a housing crisis and, before that, a property crash, the better. The emphasis is on "property", which has dominated this country, because the rich in Ireland and now their friends, international investors, make money from it. Why on earth would corporate landlords who can charge €2,500 a month want to see rental property charged at an affordable level for the average worker of €1,000 a month? It is self-evident that they would not want that to happen. They could not make profits if they did. Why would a property investor selling houses in my area on what used to be NAMA land for €600,000 want to sell them for €200,000, which would be affordable for an ordinary worker? They have no interest in that happening.”
“The Minister does not bother his backside to turn up for two housing debates in a row and the Government refuses to discuss for nine months the Housing Commission report which provided a damning indictment of the failures of Government housing policy. Why? It is because the Government does not want to solve the housing crisis. It does not care about the people who have been on housing lists for a decade or more or families and children in emergency accommodation, people who are quaking with fear because they are threatened with eviction. The Government does not care about them. The people it cares about are the corporate landlords, vulture funds and property investors. It is dancing to their tune and they do not want to solve the housing crisis because they make money from the housing crisis.”
“He needs a special class place but the boys school, which he is in, does not have that place, so he got a place in the girls school. However, the recommendation of the occupational therapist was that he should not be in the special class all the time and should integrate in and out. He cannot integrate in and out now because he is in the girls school rather than the boys school where he is supposed to be. That is just typical. Kids get assessments and are told they need this, that or the other. As Lankum’s lead singer discovered, if Members were reading the newspapers at the weekend, her daughter will receive the necessary services in 2028. That child has been failed like many hundreds and thousands of others. The Government has got to do better.”
“You know exactly how many children there are, so you can work out from the census how many children have special needs and disabilities and what resources are needed for them, and you plan for them. That is why we do the census. It is unbelievable that the Government is incapable of doing that in one of the richest countries in the world with massive budget surpluses. It cannot do the basic thing for vulnerable children. A lovely couple visited me today with their seven-year old boy who had gone to the CDNT after eventually getting his assessment. They were told this week that their son needed an occupational therapist but that the CDNT did not have one. He, therefore, has been failed at that level. He needs that support to be able to integrate properly into the school environment.”
“It is failing to provide enough teachers generally in education, enough special education teaching resources, enough special classes, enough SNAs and enough staffing in the CDNTs. One could go through the list of failures. Vulnerable children are paying the price. Parents are wracked with anxiety and stress from trying to do the best for their children, but they are up against a system that is completely dysfunctional. This situation is incredible because we are a rich country and we have a thing called the census. I do not know whether the Government has ever heard of the census but it is a thing where you count how many people there are in the country.”
“I thank Sinn Féin for tabling this motion and I thank the parents who have come in and who are devoted to their children and to vindicating their children's rights. We are talking about their rights, both under Irish law to education and under the UNCRPD to equality and to be able to participate fully in society on an equal basis to every other child. The Government is failing children and parents who are at their wits' end and who are forced to come in here to have their voices heard. The Government is breaching their legal rights in a way that is potentially - this is what has parents at their wits' end with stress and anxiety - at the expense of their children's ability to fulfil their potential as human beings. That is what is at stake for parents and the Government is failing them.”
“One of the most stressful things I have ever come across - it happens fairly regularly in my clinic - is people coming in with mental health crisis situations and threatening to take their own lives. I am not qualified to deal with that and neither are my staff. When there was a briefing in the Oireachtas a while ago, and we asked what we should do about this, we were told to call the Garda. We were told to call the Garda because we do not have 24-hour emergency services we ought to have to respond to those sort of situations.”
“I know a young woman who has a Master's degree in psychology. She had to go to the Netherlands to do that course because it is too expensive to study psychology here. Where is she now? She is working in the psychology department of an international school in Thailand where they have a department full of psychologists and young graduates from this country. She likes Thailand but she would also like to be working here. However, you have to do a PhD here and she will not be able to afford to live here. This is the problem. The Government is not recruiting people because of pay and numbers. We have massively understaffed resources. We should have psychologists, and indeed psychology departments, in every school but we do not have them because the Government will not recruit them and it is too expensive for them to live here anyway.”
“We are not allowed use the word "lies" in here, so instead we will have to say the Government is systematically misleading people about why we have a recruitment and retention crisis in our health services in general and, specifically, in our mental health services. It fails to acknowledge the reason we cannot recruit or are not recruiting the staff we need - psychologists, psychiatrists, psychiatric nurses, occupational therapists and speech and language therapists - is because of the pay and numbers strategy restricting the ability of different health areas to recruit people. I have a letter from the Psychiatric Nurses Association of Ireland, PNA, which came to me yesterday. It points out there are 700 too few psychiatric nurses in the country because of the pay and numbers strategy. A personal anecdote sums it up for me more generally.”
“Relatives of the victims of this atrocity have had to go to the High Court to try to get the Garda and the Garda Commissioner to share those; the Garda is refusing to give the Police Ombudsman of Northern Ireland and Operation Newham the files it has on the 1974 Dublin and Monaghan bombings. That stinks to high heaven. It means we have no credibility asking the British Government, which we should, to release the files it has on its outrageous collusion with the paramilitaries who carried out those massacres but the Garda Commissioner, despite repeated requests and legal action by the relatives, will not give Operation Newham the files it has on the bombings. Will the Taoiseach explain that and do something about it?”