Micheál Martin

The bottom line is that the State has intervened very strongly and assertively in the housing market. The State is the main player, I would argue, in the housing market right now in terms of the level of State investment. That is increasing and has increased over the last number of years. As I said yesterday, we are at record levels of social housing new builds compared with the last three decades…

I can come back.

What does that mean?

Come on.

A few people tried that.

Actually the State is involved in the apartment building area at huge cost and a genuine debate would ask whether there are better ways of doing it. I do not know what the Deputy means by turning the LDA into a genuine vehicle, as though it is not genuine now. However, when I indicated last week, as everyone outside agrees, that we need private sector investment-----

Most economic people and experts in housing are saying it.

The Deputy attacks people for mentioning it. She moves straight to tax breaks. She might benefit from looking at the history of her party on this. I quote: We are creating this process for bringing in private investment. I hope to launch a new scheme in relation to investment in social housing in the near future, a new process for bringing in investors. Can we guess who said that when he was Min…

-----back in the day when AK47 was firing on all cylinders.

When I mentioned it last week-----

-----there was outrage and hyperbole.

No, this was before the 2016 election.

Do not get tetchy, Alan.

I thank the Deputy for raising this issue. I accept fully that the journey of parents of children with special needs is an extremely challenging, difficult and traumatic one. They simply have to fight too hard and too long for access to services and in some cases, though not all, for education and access to school places. It is my objective as Taoiseach to change this story and it is a key priorit…

There will be a relentless focus on this for the lifetime of this Government.

I will come back on the situation on the CDNTs. That recruitment continues. On education, it should be acknowledged that there has been a huge increase in public expenditure, and rightly so, on special education. It now constitutes 25% of the overall education budget, or about €3 billion now. Money, however, does not mean a whole lot to people if they are waiting for school places. We have some 2…

I will start by acknowledging the work the Deputy did when he was the Minister responsible for this area in the last Government for close to five years. I hope he acknowledges the commitment of the Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael parties, with the Green Party, to the issue of childcare during the last Government when it dealt substantially with pay and conditions and money was allocated to successive Mi…

The immediate issue is primarily the allocation of resources and also working through what we mean by public health model and how we integrate it with the school-based model for children from the age of four and a half or four years upwards. That is the big question. We then have to ask about the funding implications of that and identify how much would it cost and how we would plan, in terms of th…

I understand what Deputy Doherty is at here. Deputy Michael Lowry is an independent TD. He is not one of ours.

I will say one thing. Sinn Féin needs to reflect. A funeral happened this week. While I have great time for the victims and for wife and those who have lost a loved one, the truth is that Deputy Doherty's party called somebody who murdered five innocent people in a bar and injured 16 more and who was involved in the murder of a trainee garda and a member of the Defence Forces in Derradda Woods a p…

What Michael Lowry did-----

-----pales into insignificance in terms of what the members of your movement did. Please-----

I would ask Deputies Doherty and McDonald-----

-----to ask members-----

-----of your movement what they did. Do not be so judgmental. I will not be getting involved in what the Moriarty tribunal.