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legal aid in the budget announced this week. I was very pleased to secure an additional €8 million in funding for the Legal Aid Board. I also managed to secure a 50% increase in funding for free legal advice centres. As the Deputy will be aware, in order … which I hope to do, it will necessarily result in a larger cohort of people eligible to receive legal advice from the Legal Aid Board. I need to ensure, in advance of raising the threshold, that I have the solicitors and legal advice providers available to ensure that

earning areas. It is an issue we need to reflect on regarding what we can do to get solicitors recruited into legal advice boards or aid boards around the country

securing of a new mandate from the Government to continue funding at an enhanced level while ensuring an adequate legal basis and compliance with state aid rules. In due course, I will seek the Government's approval to progress legislation to affect the funding to provide certainty … service and the post office network. Decisions relating to the network, including decisions relating to specific post offices are operational matters for the board and management of the company and are not ones in which I, as Minister, have any function. Similarly, the terms of the postmasters’ contract

board. We know that Israel has no bottom line - anything goes, basically - and that, previously, it killed nine people on board a humanitarian aid flotilla, so we must act immediately. Over 20 years ago, I experienced the hospitality of the people of Gaza and the West Bank … citizens, do all we can to get the humanitarian aid into Gaza and enact the occupied territories Bill in full as well as pushing for every form of international sanction that is possible and that we can legally do against this psychotic entity that calls itself Israel

West Bank do not go unchecked. Against this background, I view the two-state solution not as an aspiration but as an absolute legal obligation. There can be no interests that outweigh the fundamental principles of human rights. I welcomed the decisions of the UK, Canada, Australia, France … acknowledgement that the EU must act in the face of the rapidly deteriorating humanitarian situation in Gaza, Israel’s ongoing blockade of humanitarian aid - people are starving while trucks of food are within touching distance, if only the blockade was lifted - intensifying military operations by Israel