Mary Lou McDonald

Families are struggling, children are left without places. What is the Taoiseach's response now? Thank you, a Cheann Comhairle.

That is what global means.

Obviously I have hit a bit of a nerve there with the Taoiseach. Maybe it is just me, but I do not think a chair of Bord Bia whose company was importing Brazilian beef stands on credible ground. That is a view that I hold and I know that will be held by many farmers and people beyond that. On the childcare issue, the Government is not serious about providing the right number of places. There are 5…

Finally, he has done nothing on core funding. He had a specific promise in the programme for Government to review core funding, and to raise it, but there was not a gíog from him.

The Taoiseach is not serious about childcare. He is quite happy to let working families struggle and to have children left behind.

Some 1,000 providers have closed. Did the Taoiseach miss that?

You might stop the clock and put it back to-----

Thank you. I am obliged.

The State not alone failed Garda Margaret Loftus; it actively protected her abuser, Garda Trevor Bolger. Margaret was subjected not alone to a prolonged, sustained and violent assault, as has been commented on in the public domain, but also to a sustained campaign of threat, intimidation and menace by Trevor Bolger. Yet, this man was promoted, given a firearm, given more responsibility and protect…

I want to tell the Taoiseach about the final hours of Stephen Lavelle's life, a man from Erris in north Mayo. On the night of Saturday, 10 January, he became gravely ill shortly after arriving at the pub in Binghamstown. An ambulance was called at 10.25 p.m. but despite several follow-up calls, no ambulance arrived. A doctor was called and by the time they arrived, Stephen's family were growing mo…

I have given the Taoiseach the circumstances surrounding Stephen's death. My colleague Deputy Conway-Walsh has written to the Minister for Health setting it out. I cannot imagine the fear that must have been felt in that car that night. Imagine, on dark country roads, your father crying out in pain, your husband fighting for his life and knowing still how far away you are from the hospital. That …

A man died.

I want to return to the issue of carers, thousands of whom have received letters telling them that they may owe tax. This is a mess of the Government's making. Carers are not tax dodgers. They are people who care for others and who save the State a fortune. Some of them may work part-time just to make sure they can make ends meet because carers experience the cost-of-living crisis just like everyo…

But they are after getting a letter telling them they have a tax bill. The Taoiseach should sort that out.

9. Deputy Mary Lou McDonald asked the Taoiseach for an update on the implementation of the Dublin city task force report. [74324/25]

I put to the Taoiseach that the actions on the ground in the inner city in particular starkly contradict the aspirations of the task force plan. I will give two examples. There task force has an aspiration to expand artistic spaces and develop new cultural hubs, yet in Smithfield in the north-west inner city, The Complex, a critical hub and piece of community and artistic infrastructure, has been …

The lost facilities.

That is not a good enough answer.

I raised Portland Row as well.

I want to raise a very alarming and distressing case. It is the case of a woman from the west of Ireland left to wait six weeks to start her chemotherapy. At the end of November last, this mother of two young children received the devastating news that she had breast cancer, the same cancer her mother had died of in her 40s. To get a diagnosis of cancer is traumatic enough but to be told you have …

The issue is that it is not a specific or isolated incident. I would like to know the extent of this. I know about the case of this woman in particular. I have given the details of it. Dr. Michael McCarthy, who is president of the Irish Society of Medical Oncology, during the summer said: The reality in Galway is that patients are now typically [and I emphasise "typically"] waiting seven to eight…

-----and to know exactly how widespread this experience is and, more important, what the Government will do to fix this urgently.

That is for referrals.

No.

I can certainly do that.