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 Dublin and Monaghan bombings were the single biggest atrocity in one day of the entire Troubles when 33 people were killed in bombings that Loyalist paramilitaries admitted they carried out, almost certainly with the collusion of the British Government. The Taoiseach should ask for Britain to release all the files and information available about those atrocities but he is in a very weak position to make such demands of Keir Starmer if the Irish authorities, and the Garda specifically, are refusing to give the files in their possession about those bombings, which the families of the victims of the bombings in 1974 have repeatedly asked for.”
“What sort of respect is the Taoiseach's Government showing for 27,000 section 39 workers by not ensuring they get the pay increases they deserve?”
“The Taoiseach said earlier he cared about workers. Where is this Government's respect for 27,000 section 39 workers who look after the disabled, elderly and vulnerable and who still have not received the 8% pay rise agreed in the WRC and who still do not have the parity that was promised with workers employed directly by the health service? I was talking this morning to home care workers who are section 39 workers. They work in Ballymun with the vulnerable, people with dementia and people with disabilities. Some of them are getting a lesser hourly rate, and they are low-paid workers, than they were getting in 2008 when the austerity cuts were imposed on them. They have never had their pay restored. They have never got cost-of-living increases and they still have not got their 8%.”
“We have been asking every week since the publication of the 250-page Housing Commission report - commissioned by the Government - for a debate on that report and the Government has run away from it every single week for nine months, and again this week. Can we finally have the debate the Taoiseach says he wants on the Housing Commission report that the Government published? Of course, we know he does not want to debate it because it tells the truth about the Government's failed housing policy, how its targets are completely inadequate, and it is not able to meet the targets anyway.”
“They should be allowed fill the gaps in order to provide teachers until they get full-time people who are willing to take on jobs.”
“Gaelscoil Phádraig in Loughlinstown in my area has had a lot to put up with. School authorities have been waiting 20 years in temporary accommodation to get into their new and permanent location, which is bad enough. From talking to them this week, my colleagues in my office were saying their big problem now is just getting teachers. While they have sanction for additional full-time posts, they cannot get anybody because of the accommodation crisis, etc., but they are prohibited, it appears, from getting on an interim basis substitute teachers or retired teachers to try to fill the gaps while they try and recruit for full-time posts. The Department will not let them do this. That seems lacking basic common sense.”
“Our third level institutions are falling down the international league tables. We are putting fees in the way of people getting MAs and doctorates and so on. That is the kind of investment we need to make ourselves more resilient against the behaviour of the Elon Musks and the Donald Trumps of this world.”
“I have always argued that multinational capital is not quite as mobile as the Minister thinks. They make big investments and do not just run off and leave them overnight. The Government parties have argued that they have to get down on their knees and offer them zero-rate taxes. The rate is 12.5% in theory but in reality it is less than 1% for Apple, as we know. In reality, it is an effective rate of approximately 5% across the board for multinationals but the truth is they are making a lot of profits here, far more than anywhere else. They need access to the European market, by and large, they want to be in an English-speaking country and they need a skilled workforce. That is something the Government should be thinking about because we are falling down in that area.”
“We are too vulnerable, not just to Americans but to a small number of flipping oligarchs - I do not care what country they are from - including a tiny number of the Elon Musks of this world and their equivalents in multinationals. That is the problem. We need to diversify our economy and we need to tax these people more. The Minister says expand the tax base by carbon taxes; I say wealth taxes, financial transaction taxes and taxes on wealth and capital so that these people do not control our fate.”
“Donald Trump is on a wrecking mission, that is obvious, although I would caution against allowing his Administration to bully us. The reason they have to make America great again is the American economy has declined massively. It used to have 40% GDP, which then went down to 20% by 2014 and it is now down to 15%. The American empire is in decline and Donald Trump personifies that decline. He is trying to reassert global hegemony by bullying people and we should not be bullied. Most of the multinationals here are here because they make a lot of money and they are not going to run away and leave those profits behind. Having said that, the key thing is we have to diversify our economy.”
“These are barriers to people moving around and, ultimately, they are having a negative impact on our ability to function as an economy and society. For example, a lot of our young artists go to Britain because the conditions for performers, actors, directors and so on are better in Britain than they are here. As the Equity union has pointed out again and again, the UK has a decent agreement between Equity and film and other arts producers, so our talent are leaving because they are on substandard, often crappy, precarious contracts here. We should think about making Ireland a bit more attractive for our young people as well.”
“However, I am also wondering why they are going to the Netherlands to study. The reason they give is that there are no fees for a master's degree in the Netherlands. Here, a master's degree costs €6,000 per year. In the Netherlands students can also find affordable accommodation. As well as wanting our young people and young people generally to have the right to travel, work and study abroad, we might also want to be encouraging people to stay here or even people to come here to work and study and so on, when we consider the shortages in all sorts of areas such as the health service and education. However, we are putting barriers in their way because we have excessive fees for master's degrees and postgraduate studies.”
“Other countries in Europe are threatening to go down the road of this anti-immigrant politics. It can have a domino effect where eventually it could come back to bite us as well, in terms of the ability of our young people to travel. As has been said, we have a long history and tradition of our people going all over the world to work, study or simply to travel and meet other peoples, cultures and societies. Do we really want our young people to face that anti-immigrant sentiment that certain political forces are trying to whip up? It will happen if we give succour to this. Some examples are a little bit of a warning on another level to us. In recent years, I have been amazed by the number of young people who are going to study in the Netherlands. At one level, it is a very good thing that young people do so.”
“Part of that is the experience of travelling abroad, learning from other people, interacting with different cultures, different types of societies and different economic models. People learn from these experiences and everybody is enriched by them. Thankfully, there is some recognition here that young people in Britain are losing out as a result of not having that freedom to move around Europe to work, study and to interact with other cultures and societies. There is evidence that the UK has benefited nothing and has almost certainly lost out as a result of adopting this anti-immigrant position. When they get into this anti-immigrant mentality, people should consider whether they really want such a situation. These things have knock-on consequences.”
“I am happy to support this motion for Ireland to opt in to the negotiating mandate on the EU-UK youth experience scheme. It is worth noting that the consequences of the anti-immigrant sentiment that drove the right wing campaign in the UK against the EU are now becoming apparent. It should be a salutary warning to people who want to go down the road of anti-immigration that it comes back to bite you in all sorts of ways. From an economic point of view, the UK has not thrived as a result of the Brexit decision. David Ricardo an economist of pro-market inclination and Karl Marx, a classical 19th-century economist, both agreed that all wealth derives from human labour. Something that the anti-immigrant brigade does not seem to understand is that human beings are needed to make a society and an economy prosper.”
“Society is not a football game. Perhaps the Taoiseach thinks it is. We need our housing to be affordable for young people and to remove financial barriers to education that drive many of our young people out.”
“Classical economists Karl Marx and David Ricardo, on different sides of the political spectrum, agreed that all wealth is derived from labour. One of our biggest problems is skills shortages in every sector of our economy, whether it is construction, the health service, education or retail. The reason is increasing numbers in their tens of thousands of young people are bailing out of the country because they cannot afford to live here. If we are talking about competitiveness, this is the biggest challenge. I do not like competition as the basis of an economy but let us say we need the economy to function in order----”
“Some are being hospitalised or they have to go to doctors. They are getting medical testimony saying they should not be living in these conditions, yet they are still not being rehoused. Something needs to be done about this as a matter of urgency.”
“Sallynoggin. Since I raised this, the people are still in there and still looking to get out. By the way, the Rialto Action Group took a legal case against Dublin City Council some years ago because these kinds of conditions are a breach of the European Social Charter. The group won the case. The Sallynoggin case is similar. These people's rights are being breached by the local authority. Since I raised the case here last week - it was televised and so on - I have been inundated with messages from people living in similar conditions of damp, black mould and rodent infestations in local authority housing. It is not good enough. At the very least, there should be an instruction from the Minister for housing that such people will be prioritised to be rehoused, particularly where children are involved.”
“About a week ago, I raised the plight of tenants in Sallynoggin who have been living in council houses for years with infants and children where there is mould all over the walls, all of the time, water running down the insides of the walls and rodent infestations. The tenants are still being forced to live there. It has been earmarked for redevelopment but the point is that the tenants want out of there because the conditions are terrible. People are getting pneumonia.”
“Given the role they play in projecting out the democracy of this country and the importance of that, they should have decent jobs and proper retainers and should not have to live in poverty in this precarious existence.”
“Imagine over the last three months, as the Government was debating who would be in government and then forming that Government, not having any work and not knowing when they were going to be able to work, being laid off during the summer, at Easter and at Christmas but having to be always available to work for the company, whose name is Pi Comms. I am not sure, and maybe the Taoiseach will confirm the details, but I think the company gets €5 million or even €7 million per year for the contract. All of the equipment is provided directly by the Oireachtas and all the paperwork is done by the Oireachtas, so the only overhead that we can see for the company is to pay the workforce, who are on miserable earnings and have very few hours. There are five permanent workers but the majority of them are living in poverty.”
“The programme for Government refers to work-life balance, quality of life, quality employment and it even contains the phrase "a secure future for all living things", which is quite a noble ambition. I want to shout out for a group of workers very close at hand who do not have any of those things. They are the majority of people who work for Oireachtas TV, who broadcast proceedings from this Dáil Chamber, the Seanad Chamber and the committees but who are only employed on the days that we sit. That means that over the course of the year, they earn about €12,000. Imagine trying to exist on €12,000.”
“We need to get these vulture funds and profit vampires out of the housing sector and get the State to build public and affordable housing on public land. If we could do that when this country was an impoverished, virtually Third World country, we can certainly do it when it is one of the richest countries in the world.”
“It is unbelievable. That was a publicly owned site the National Asset Management Agency, NAMA, sold off to private investors, who sat on it, waited for the value of that property and asset to rise and only started building when they could charge €600,000 or €700,000, prices that are completely unaffordable. The only people who can afford them then, of course, are institutional investors. Approximately 60% of all home purchases last year were by institutional investors, many of them these vulture funds. They have no interest in driving down rents or house prices. The higher the rents and the house prices, the more profits they make, but the Government wants to incentivise them more. It is absolutely sickening. The housing crisis is being orchestrated by people who make money out of it.”
“Some people benefit from it. The worse the crisis gets, the more that landlords and investors can charge unaffordable rents and house prices. The State needs to intervene and stop the profiteering of speculators, landlords and vulture funds, get vulture funds completely out of the housing sector, build public and affordable housing on a not-for-profit basis, develop its own capacity to do so through a State construction company and control rents in order that they will be kept at affordable levels. I just find it unbelievable that the Government is going on about the poor landlords and the poor property investors, for whom rents in Dublin of €2,400 a month are not enough. They need a tax incentive as well as charging these shocking rents or house prices that are now at €600,000 in new developments in Cherrywood in my area.”
“The simple reason we have a housing disaster in this country is that Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have danced to the tune of greedy, profit-driven speculators, vulture funds and corporate landlords. The response to the resulting crisis, which has left us with 100,000 families waiting for more than a decade on housing lists, unaffordable rents and unaffordable house prices, is for the Taoiseach to say we need to pivot more towards the very private investors, driven by a greed for profit, that caused the crisis in the first instance. You could not make it up. This should not surprise us, coming from a Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael Government, which now includes regional Independents, that is packed full of landlords who themselves make money out of the housing crisis. This is the dirty secret of the housing crisis in this country.”
“The Minister cannot wash his hands of this. He has a responsibility, as does TUD, to ensure - by the way, it is in the contract with BIMM - that employment rights are respected. BIMM will not even meet IFUT and it has refused to go to the WRC. The Minister needs to crack the whip and intervene in this on behalf of the workers.”
“TUD is publicly funded. Some 80% of the students at BIMM are on courses provided by TUD. It gives €3 million in direct funding to BIMM and the SUSI grants and other moneys the students receive go to BIMM. It is public money. The Minister does have responsibility. He cannot wash his hands of this. Given his responsibility for higher education, the Minister has an interest in ensuring that every single teacher and lecturer working in higher education is treated properly and not subjected to a race to the bottom and to breaches of their employment rights. The idea that people would be forced to reapply for their own jobs and become so-called freelance having been employees for years is simply bogus self-employment. That is orchestrated, pre-meditated bogus self-employment. It should not be allowed in degree courses that are being run by TUD.”
“TUD has outsourced this degree course to BIMM but these 53 workers have been treated shamefully. Many of them have been working there for a decade or more and they have been told to reapply for their own jobs. There are still as many students and the work is still there but BIMM has decided to tell the workers to reapply for their own jobs and has proposed that most of them would become freelance, when they were previously employed and on conditions that are about 50% of what they were previously employed under. Some of them would be given a "yellow pack" grade of lectureship at about 50% of what they were paid before. This is a disgraceful way to treat these people who are delivering an important course in music. We are asking for an intervention with TUD to end the shameful treatment of these workers.”
“The Minister is new in the job at the Department and I ask him to intervene on behalf of lecturers in the British and Irish Modern Music, BIMM, institute. Four of those lecturers are here in the Public Gallery. They were all on the picket lines earlier. I was with them today on Thomas Street. They have been forced to take strike action and mount protests because of absolutely shameful treatment by BIMM. This is a private company but 500, or 80%, of its students are effectively students of the Technological University of Dublin, TUD. This institution is funded to provide this course in commercial modern music. The students apply through the CAO to TUD. Their degrees are ratified - I am sure that is not the right word - by TUD. The degrees are awarded by TUD.”
“As was requested at the Business Committee, we are looking for a discussion on the housing crisis and the announcements the Government is making and an opportunity to question the new Minister about the Government's crazy housing proposals.”
“The Government is planning to further expand the gravy train of ministerial jobs and allowances and it is doing it with a guillotine to suppress proper debate and discussion of the expanded gravy train it is planning. This is completely unacceptable. There should not be a guillotine. Additionally, we have had very alarming pronouncements made by the Taoiseach that he is planning to, effectively, hand over the housing sector, lock, stock and barrel, to profit-driven investors. I refer to private investors, vulture funds and corporate landlords - the very people who are responsible for the housing crisis that we have.”
“The Government parties said during the election campaign that they were for Palestine, that they would pass the occupied territories Bill and that they cared about the genocide, but then they inserted a definition into the programme for Government that effectively is designed to censor anybody who says the Israeli state project is an apartheid, racist project.”
“Similarly, when it comes to section 39 workers, the Government says it is difficult to recruit people. It is difficult because a significant number of people who look after the disabled and who provide care for them work for lesser pay and conditions than those who are employed directly by the HSE. They have been forced to ballot for industrial action because the Government will not give them pay parity and proper conditions of employment. My final point relates to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition. Where did that come from? That was not mentioned.”
“In relation to the crisis in the health service, the Government said that it was trying to recruit people but that it is difficult to do so. We have been campaigning for the past six months, prompted by health workers who explained to us last summer that the Government is not trying to recruit people, and we have raised this repeatedly. It is not that it is difficult. The Government is not trying to do it because of pay and numbers, which it never announced publicly. The Government has been rumbled by health workers who are balloting. All grades of health workers have balloted overwhelmingly in favour of industrial action because the Government has not been lying but has been misleading the public about its failure to recruit people into the health services.”
“They deliberately misled the public about the reasons for the housing crisis and not just about the numbers or targets. They misled the public by saying 40,000 were built when only 30,000 were built. They also misled the public as to why, after more than a decade, they have not solved the housing crisis. The reason is that they are dancing to the tune of people who are making money from it. That is why the Government will not build social housing, ban no-fault evictions or build affordable housing that people can afford. That is why it will not impose rent controls and why families and children are living in squalor in emergency accommodation. Somebody is making money out of it, whether that be investment funds, vulture funds, landlords, property speculators or developers, and the Government will not do anything about it.”
“Lies, lies, lies. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael won the election based on a pack of lies about some of the most serious issues facing the country, whether that is housing, the crisis in the health service, looking after the disabled and those who need care-----”
“As we know from the Rialto case in Dolphin's Barn, it is a breach of their rights under the European Social Charter to be forced to live in these conditions. They should be moved and there should be a system of prioritisation for families with children when they are living in conditions that are making them sick and that are not fit for human habitation. Will the Tánaiste act on this?”
“Since I met them during the general election campaign I have been advocating on behalf of four families, three with young children and infants, who are living in council maisonettes in my area in Sallynoggin. They are living in absolutely deplorable conditions. There is rodent infestation, black mould and damp running down the walls. One of the tenants told me this morning that there was ice inside because of the water running down the walls. These maisonettes have been earmarked for redevelopment but in the meantime the children and their families, for years now, have been sick. They have submitted letter after letter to the council asking to be urgently rehoused in appropriate accommodation.”
“Workers in the ESB went on strike a few years ago precisely because of the contracting out of their work, which lessened their capacity to respond to emergencies like this. This also highlights our ability to deal with all sorts of emergencies. Last week, workers from the National Ambulance Service came to me and I was shocked when they told me that in Scotland, which has the same population as Ireland, there are 6,196 people working in the ambulance service, whereas in Ireland, we have 2,321, less than half of what they have in Scotland. Our ambulance service, a key emergency service, is an instance of an area where we are massively understaffed and underresourced. We need to get those resources in place.”
“The destruction wreaked on forests should prompt us once again to think about the monoculture model of forestry in this country because monocultures of Sitka spruce, planted in straight lines, are much more vulnerable to being knocked over during storms. They also make flooding worse. We need a system like Scotland's to get emergency payments to people. In Scotland, rather than people having to go through the rigmarole of the community welfare officer, emergency payments are sent directly to people as soon as they are impacted by severe weather events. We need to think again about the outsourcing of much of the ESB's and Irish Water's work to contractors that robs them of the direct capacity to do a lot of the jobs.”
“Thankfully, much of Dublin escaped the worst ravages of Storm Éowyn but I know that, across the country, tens of thousands of people suffered extreme hardship as a result of water and power outages. The lack of resilience of our key infrastructure in those areas of water and power exposed extreme vulnerabilities in our ability to respond to emergency situations. Some, including some in this House, who scoffed at weather warnings before the storm should, quite honestly, hang their heads in shame. We obviously need to do an emergency audit of our electricity grid and our water infrastructure to make sure they are going to be weather resilient.”
“Are Government members going to go over and hand a bowl of shamrock to that monster in the White House who is threatening to ethnically cleanse 2 million Palestinians and is arming the regime that is committing genocide? The least the Government can do is pass the occupied territories Bill. In fact, we need to go a lot further. Just like apartheid South Africa, this terrorist regime must be cast out of the community of civilised nations. The Government must kick out the ambassador and all diplomatic personnel, stop the US military using Shannon and cut off all trade with this regime, or it has not a semblance of humanity.”
“Last night, in the latest ravings of Donald Trump, we got a threat by the US President on television to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity, namely, the crime of ethnic cleansing. Donald Trump should now be indicted by the International Criminal Court for saying what Netanyahu told the world he was going to do before he started the Gaza genocide when his Government threatened publicly to commit genocide against the people of Gaza. The world stood by and did nothing. We continued to treat the Israeli state as if it is a normal state, maintaining relations with it, continuing to trade with it and being part of a European Union that arms it to the teeth.”
“We are objecting to the Order of Business. The Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and so-called Independents gravy train has arrived, in the form of the Ministers and Secretaries and Ministerial, Parliamentary, Judicial and Court Offices (Amendment) Bill 2025, to give more jobs, allowances and Ministries to spread out the spoils of an election. It is really blatant and outrageous and the Government is not even proposing that there would be a debate on it. This is not a particularly good sign of where this Government is heading. It tried strokes last week to steal Opposition time and now it is going to loot the public purse with new allowances and new Ministries which quite possibly are in breach of the Constitution.”
“It is an insult for this government to start off with another two-week break when we should be meeting to discuss the crisis of housing and homelessness that is blighting the lives of tens of thousands of people in this country and the absolutely disastrous situation in our health service that has led those section 39 workers and health workers to ballot for industrial action en masse . We oppose this nomination.”
“As somebody asked me on the street as I was coming in here today, do those making the proposal think that children living in emergency accommodation are going to get two weeks' respite from the hardship and suffering they are enduring? Do they think that section 39 workers, nurses and the health workers who are run off their feet in our hospitals are going to get two weeks' respite from the stress they are under? Do they think people who are in pain while on waiting lists for hospital procedures are going to get two weeks' respite from the suffering they are enduring?”
“We will not support the nomination of any Fianna Fáil or, for that matter, Fine Gael Taoiseach. There are many reasons for that but we saw one of them this week when Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael were implicated in an attempt by so-called Independents, the Healy-Raes and the Regional Independent Group to insult the intelligence of the people of this country and to undermine our democracy by trying to claim they were in opposition when they are a party to the programme for Government and are committed to supporting that Government. Thankfully, a united Opposition and public outrage has forced them to backtrack on this absurd proposal. It is utterly outrageous that, when we are facing almost three months without a functioning Dáil, there is going to be yet another two weeks off.”
“However, we continue our opposition to the decision to suspend the Dáil for another two weeks. There are too many pressing issues for people in this country and we will be opposing the Order of Business on that specific basis.”