Peadar Tóibín

I look forward to the Minister sending the figures to me. In those figures we know there was a fall of 4,000 in the number of cancer diagnoses in 2020. These are the figures that were given to us by the previous Minister for Health. That fall in cancer diagnoses happened because the Government shut down significant elements of the health service. It stopped the cancer screening processes during th…

The Minister is right that Covid killed many people, for sure. Cancer also killed many people, for sure. We have not had a Covid inquiry yet so we do not know the effectiveness or net benefit in terms of saving people's lives of shutting down hospital services and stopping cancer patients getting treatment. The Minister mentioned survival rates. The National Cancer Registry shows Ireland has a bre…

Ireland is facing a significant economic storm. The threatened tariff war with the United States could do immense damage to the current Irish economic model. Proposed changes to the US corporation tax could be catastrophic in terms of the Irish economy. Successive Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael Governments have put all our economic eggs in bargain basement corporation taxes. For sure, FDI is good and n…

That is hardly enough in this regard.

I am asking the Minister what engagement he has had with the senior US Administration? What engagement have the Taoiseach and Tánaiste had with the US Administration-----

-----with regard to trying to mitigate against the damage of a tariff war?

Will the Minister answer the question that I asked today, not the question I asked two months ago, please?

It is a point of amusement that the Minister's instinct is to get tribal every time an Opposition TD puts him under pressure.

It is incredible, when a straight question is asked regarding the engagement the Minister, the Minister for Justice, the Tánaiste or the Taoiseach have had with senior elements of the US Administration, in what is possibly one of the biggest existential economic threats to Ireland at the moment, that in the three or four minutes the Minister had to answer that, the summation of his response was "z…

I ask the Minister to leave the tribalism aside for one minute and answer the question directly if possible.

With the US.

I said FDI in Ireland is good. I said FDI is positive.

The Minister is arguing a point that nobody has made.

The Minister is arguing a point that nobody has made.

I move amendment No. 1 to amendment No. 1: To delete all words after "notes that:" and substitute the following: "— there needs to be a disciplinary process for senior civil servants for instances of repeated waste of public funds; — accountability needs to be written into the contracts of senior civil servants; and — there should be a Minister of State for Accountability, nominated and locate…

It opened-----

The people feel that.

The Minister of State is digging.

I want to raise another example of Government waste. The Minister for Social Protection told Aontú yesterday that there were €100 million in overpayments on the PUP payments in the Covid period. A total of 42,400 PUP overpayments were made during that period of time. Some 1,400 PUP payments were made due to fraud during that time. Due to the cyberattack, we had a specific type of fraud that happen…

Nobody argues that.

No.

You are answering a different question.

Some 42,000 overpayments; €100 million.

With safeguards.

You cannot set up payments without safeguards. That is what you are saying.