Danny Healy-Rae

-----employment for so many people over many years and providing food for our people.

I am not calling a vote today-----

-----but I am totally against it.

I can tell you-----

I am entitled to talk about something as important as this.

Was I not left talk the last day about the foxes, when-----

-----they brought in something else ridiculous.

They are still attacking farmers.

We all know that when a child presents with special needs and needs special assistance, it places a massive burden on his or her parents. The parents would prefer to see something wrong with themselves rather than their child. The Minister of State and I know that we do not need reports. We need funding. We need more specialist teachers and places and we need to speed up the assessment of need pro…

I am glad to get the opportunity to talk on this motion this evening. To start, we all have to honour, respect and remember those leaders, men and women who fought for our country in 1916 and around that time, including during the Civil War, and all those who died along the way so we could be here having our own democratic Parliament. Everyone is entitled to talk and say what they believe in here.…

I thank Deputy Michael Collins and his group for tabling this motion and giving us all an opportunity to talk about housing and discuss it as much as we can to see if we can help. This is one of many motions, Bills and whatever trying to address housing, but we really need to get down to work and see after the people to ensure that everyone has a home. The answer has to be to build more local auth…

Like everyone else, I was horrified by the "Prime Time" exposé. We have great nursing homes, both public and private, in County Kerry. We have great staff. They are second to none and do their very best. I cannot understand why different rates are paid to public and private nursing homes. I cannot understand that. There is no better place for elderly people to age than at home. We should strive to…

I thank Sinn Féin for opening up this debate and giving us the opportunity to talk on this important matter. Yes, Ireland consists of Thirty-two Counties, not Twenty-six Counties. We need to know more from the Government as to what it means by not opposing this motion. The Government needs to be more transparent as to what it believes, what it is thinking of, how this will be done or when will it …

I am glad to get the opportunity to discuss with the Minister of State the promised appeals process for business grants where businesses were misclassified, including the power up grant. When will this appeals process begin? In the past few days, we have been in contact with our local authority and it has not been informed of any appeals process or it is not sure if it will happen. In addition to …

I thank the Minister of State, but I am a bit confused now. First, I thank the Government for bringing in these two schemes. I also thank my local authority and all of the local authorities around the country for the great work they did in delivering those grants to the people involved who had applied. The Minister of State has just said that the local authorities are working through the misclassi…

I am glad to get the opportunity to speak. We have more public transport at the present time. There is a service from Kenmare through to Kilgarvan to Killarney that is great, but maybe a medium-sized bus would suffice rather than the large bus it has. Maybe we could get more bus stops. We need more bus stops because it is not much good to have a bus passing by when people are waiting by the side o…

The cost of building a new house is somewhere around €400,000 for a young couple or whomever. One third of the actual building cost comprises VAT, other taxes and levies. Will the Government consider doing anything about that? Would it be possible to increase the first-time buyers grant if people were incentivised to build smaller houses, like we used to do in the 1970s and 1980s. I refer to any …

The waiving of the levy is gone now.

I am glad to get the opportunity to talk about this Bill. It relates to an important topic. People talk a good deal about local property tax, especially those who can ill-afford to pay it and who are often in trouble. It gives those people who are living hand to mouth and who barely have enough to cover the cost of everything, from putting food on the table to keeping their heat or whatever going,…

I am glad to get the opportunity to talk about housing again. This is a crisis. Everyone recognises that it is a crisis. I am not one bit happy that landlords or homeowners are being blamed for what is happening in the rental sector. Every side seems to be pointing at people who own houses and are trying to rent them out. I point out that I do have no house only my own. There are many vacant house…

I am glad to have the opportunity to talk about housing again tonight. Since I came up here in 2016, we have been talking about it constantly. Every man and woman who has sat here in the Dáil has talked about housing but little has changed. I want to speak about vacant properties. I spoke about this last year, the year before and recently but the story is the same. There are vacant houses and pro…

We need to do more. We have talked enough and the Government needs to act now, please.

I am here as well.

I thank Deputy Gould and Sinn Féin for tabling this very important motion. There is no shadow of a doubt that houses in the local authorities are taking too long to turn around. There was one house in Killarney I fought tooth and nail over. From the day it first came up here, it took over five years to get that house in Marian Terrace turned around. There was vermin and everything else gone into i…

He is ambitious but I do not think he will bring it down to that. He is a good man and he is trying his best but it will not happen if we are here until-----