First of all, the Government is absolutely clear on the need to deal robustly and very firmly with antisocial behaviour. An investigation is under way and that restricts what I could say but we are very conscious of the very grave consequences that can arise from antisocial and unacceptable behaviour by people, the degree to which communities are under pressure, and the degree of anger out there in communities at the perception or sense that certain people can ignore the law. We do need to acknowledge that An Garda Síochána is bringing criminals to justice and to account very significantly in terms of the gangland scene in general but also in terms of many other crimes within communities. The key issue for us in the post-Covid period has been visibility. The Government has a policy of very high visibility and the new Commissioner, Justin Kelly, is equally of that view. The position is improving significantly in terms of the numbers coming out of Templemore. I attended a graduation ceremony in Templemore just before Christmas. Huge and record numbers came out, to be followed up by even higher numbers going in. It is not true to say that people will not be able to go onto the streets straight away. I am informed by the Minister that they will. Some 170 are coming out of Templemore next week. They will be on the streets. I have seen it in different parts of the country. The idea has been to allocate significant numbers to given communities. Those coming out next week will be allocated to the communities the Deputy has referenced. I accept the anger in such communities and it does work where you have high-visibility policing. The recruitment and retention is well under way. There is a Garda budget of about €2.74 billion in 2026. An extra 1,000 new gardaí will come on stream, with a doubling of the Garda Reserve as well, to over 600. We ran two recruitment campaigns in 2025. There is a steady pipeline of new recruits. Over 11,000 applications to join An Garda Síochána were received last year. We had 194 gardaí attested in November. In 2025, we had around 617 newly attested gardaí. Some 223 trainees entered Templemore in November, which is the largest intake at Templemore since 2014. The total number of trainees to enter Templemore is close to 800, the largest since 2018. We now have a total of 14,462 gardaí across the State and we are going to continue that level and pace of recruitment on an ongoing basis and for the duration of this Government. The funding will be provided to enable that to happen. The Minister, Deputy O'Callaghan, has already had substantial discussions with the Commissioner in regard to the allocation of those resources to improve Garda visibility across our country but particularly in areas where antisocial behaviour is strongest, and also in our city and town centres, where there has been a lot of activity around drug trafficking-----
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-----and also in regard to theft from shops and businesses and so on. People basically want to go about their normal lives with a sense of safety and security. Greater numbers of gardaí on the streets will help that. That is happening and it will continue to happen.
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The Deputy just said the Minister said something at the committee yesterday which the Minister has just very clear said he did not say at the committee yesterday. I cannot respond-----
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I cannot respond. I am not responding to assertions by the Deputy that are not soundly based. Deputy McDonald just pointed to Deputy Carthy, so she clearly did not hear the Minister saying that yesterday.
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Yes but the Deputy said it as if she knew it - as if she had heard it.
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She said it as if she had heard it.
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Deputy Carthy was Opposition spokesperson for defence. I know how he can exaggerate and how he can spin and he can do a lot of things like that.
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No.
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The Minister for justice has made it clear to me he did not say that yesterday.
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He is saying it here and I am saying it here in the House now. I am simply saying Deputy McDonald did not hear that yesterday.
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I just want to make the more fundamental point-----
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The Deputy is not the leader yet.
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I want to make the more fundamental point, if I may-----
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On the recruitment numbers, we are recruiting gardaí at record numbers-----
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In Dublin city the gardaí have increased significantly and people have seen that.
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You are not allowing me to answer the question.
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First, may I extend my deepest sympathies to the family of the late Brian O’Shea and to his wife, Eileen. I served with Brian in the House. He was a thorough gentleman and a wonderful parliamentarian. He was always calm and always thought of things in perspective. Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam dílis. I find the Deputy’s presentation, if she does not mind my saying so, somewhat incoherent and a bit chaotic in the sense that one moment she uses the word "deregulation". I just cannot comprehend how she thinks a Bill, which will create a national rent regulation framework, is deregulation.
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She cannot have it each and every way. We will now have national rent control over the entire country and the Deputy calls that deregulation. We will strengthen the protection for renters through the introduction of tenancies of minimum duration, which is an effective end to no-fault eviction. We are establishing a rent price register. In fairness, the Deputy acknowledged that but at the same time she called all of that chaotic. Both cannot be correct. The arrangements to reset the rental market rate only every six years is important. First of all, six years is a bigger protection than would have been there heretofore but, second, there has to be a balance between attracting private sector investment in addition to the enormous public sector investment in housing. The Department of Finance estimates that to get to 50,000 houses a year, we need about €20 billion in the economy allocated and spent on housing. The State will not be in a position to find €20 billion every year for the next ten years and, therefore, we do need a balance. There is no question but that this emanated from the national Housing Commission although not the specifics. The national Housing Commission was very clear. The Deputy has said this time and again that the Government ignored the housing commission. We did not, actually. We moved on the recommendations pertaining to rent. It said the present situation cannot continue. You have to give permanent clarity and a degree of certainty to the market over a significant period of time and that is what this legislation will do. The reform of the rent pressure zones was necessary and was recommended by the Housing Commission. Real investment in dwellings for the first three quarters of 2025 were up 12.7% vis-à-vis 2024. Completions for the first three quarters of 2025 were the highest since 2008. Planning permissions are up 29% and 50% on the second quarter of 2025. That is planning permissions in the third quarter of last year. Commencements in the fourth quarter of 2025 are up 50% on the previous quarter. The housing infrastructure and investment fund has been announced and there is a further €1 billion there over the next number of years.
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The feedback from our budgetary measures is positive in terms of getting more apartments going in that particular sector.
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The case the Deputy just outlined would be covered by these regulations and she is opposing them. There is no point in raising individual cases here, with the correct empathy and so on like that, if she then proposes to oppose the very measure that would prevent three such evictions in a short number of years.
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That is exactly what this regulation is trying to counteract and deal with. More importantly, I take issue with the Deputy's construction company in terms of the substance behind it. Is she saying we are going to have direct labour in every local authority or direct labour by the State? Is that the model?
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We have delivered 53,000 social houses since we came back in 2020 through local authorities and through approved housing bodies. That is a good mechanism for social housing and it is working. We need more affordable housing and we need more apartment building in addition to what we are doing on social housing. We are getting results on social housing, no question, where construction is at its highest since the 1970s. We are going to continue with that and increase it in the time ahead.
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First of all, the Government did discontinue the specific measures that we had introduced for the previous two years to deal with inflation across the board. It was not any one particular sector. The Deputy continually and disingenuously narrows it down and say we made cuts. We got rid of the one-off payments. They were not fiscally sustainable and they are not fiscally sustainable. That is the bottom line here and we need to be honest and real about it. I know those in opposition will not be because they will always come back and say we could provide another €100 million here or €500 million there. Having once-off payments is not a sustainable way to deal with these issues. However, we did take measures in the budget to support people with disabilities, which the Deputy has ignored, because the budget is not just about payments in themselves. Across all five pillars of the strategy, supporting disabled people at every stage of life, we took measures. The cost of disability is one of those and we will deal with that comprehensively in the next budget. We delivered a record 20% increase in disability funding because supporting disabilities is about investment in services. It is about practical supports. It is about opportunities in education, opportunities in employment and opportunities in community participation. That investment in services is vital and needs to happen on a sustained basis, so we put it permanently into the budget - not once-off, but permanently into the budget for the long haul in respect of improving services in all those aspects of life for people with a disability. We have to strengthen mainstream public support and measures for households impacted by disability on a sustainable basis. We increased the core rate of social welfare payments by €10, bringing personal rates to €254. We increased domiciliary care allowance by €20 monthly. We increased the earnings disregard for the carer's allowance to €1,000 per single person and €2,000 for a couple. The analysis by the ESRI and the Department of Finance confirms the positive impact of these decisions. It concludes that the at-risk-of-poverty rate across the population falls by 1.7%, with the largest reductions for older people, a fall of 6.2%, and for the population affected by disability, a fall of 3.8%. Those are not my figures; they come from the ESRI and the Department of Finance. On the cost-of-disability payment, the Minister is consulting. He wants to do it properly and on a sustainable basis and he is working on that. This is a five-year Government. We committed to this and we are going to do it. We are going to do it in a proper structured way and not with a once-off measure or anything like that. It has to be done that way. This is not simple either and let us not pretend it is. This has to be done properly and that is what the Minister is going to do. He was referring to political commentary, not commentary from representative organisations. The Deputy should not deliberately misrepresent in that way.
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We did not cut anyone's income by €1,400.
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Hold on now. We brought in emergency one-off payments for two years for a whole range of sectors. The Deputy knows that well. Fine, he is in opposition and has to spin it in the way that he is spinning it.
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What we did in the budget was to introduce record increases in investment in services for people with disabilities-----
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------in education, in health and in areas like respite and residential where we have to substantially increase provision. The way to do that is to allocate funding on a sustainable and permanent basis. The additional needs payments are there and that is what the Minister is referring to as well. They are there for people who are in difficulty in terms of heating and food. Those payments are there and 2,300 people availed of them last year. They are available to people who end up in difficulty for one reason or another. Our social protection programme is there to help people in those circumstances.
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I find the Deputy's contribution interesting-----
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-----because she quotes the poem, "First They Came." That is more applicable to the Maduro regime than------
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It is. What is the "aw" about?
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President Trump was democratically elected by the American people in an emphatic electoral victory. The Deputy may not like that but she cannot actually dispute it. Maduro stole the election and had a regime of repression that was reprehensible.
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I am answering the question.
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It was a regime of repression and that regime came for people. It created the largest migration out of Venezuela ever in that country's history. I met with migrants from Venezuela when I was at COP. They told me in a very sad way of the demise and destruction of their country by Maduro and Chávez before him.
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People on the other side of the House were sneaking regarders of the Maduro regime. It always strikes me as extraordinary that the main Opposition party attended his inauguration. That is the difference in the House here. Let us be under no illusions.
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I am. Of course I am.
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We have compromised not one iota of our values in terms of our engagement with the United States-----
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-----or in terms of our position, for example, on the Middle East, where there was significant pushback. Ireland is recognised around the world as asserting its principled position. I salute what Prime Minister Carney said at Davos. It is exactly what we have been doing: application of principle and pragmatism. The principle is we believe in an international rules-based order. We have not compromised on that and will not. When it came to Greenland, we very firmly and calmly, along with our European partners and member states - Deputy Coppinger has no time for the European Union but I will say it anyway - did not compromise our core position in terms of the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Greenland and Denmark. We did not compromise at all. That remains our position but I believe in engagement. I do not believe in the Deputy's approach that we should not engage with anybody. If I was to apply her approach, there are many people in the world we would not be engaging with. She is very selective. Her party and group has an obsession with the United States. It does not have to be President Trump; it could be President Biden or President Obama.
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That has been a consistent thread in that group's presentations here for the past two decades.
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Not just Deputy Coppinger personally but people with her and Deputy Murphy and so on like that.
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"Bread on the table" is about workers of this country-----
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------who you purport to represent. You ignore the reality of the importance of that economic relationship.
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Could I first of all say that yesterday in the House, Government sought sanction for a loan for Ukraine? The Deputy was not there to vote but her colleagues voted against that. We support peace-----
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I will answer now in whatever way I deem to answer-----
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-----and if you do not like it, that is your problem. The bottom line is this. The Deputy and her colleagues have been consistent on Ukraine. They will preface remarks by saying "We're against Putin, blah, blah, blah" but move on quickly.
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There are 30 million people-----
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Deputy Murphy voted against €90 billion for Ukraine that Europe wanted to give to support the ordinary people of Ukraine to weather the appalling assault by Russia. That is his position.
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You always find an excuse. I want to say this. In terms of our fundamental principles, we do not compromise. We have had a long historic relationship with the United States. It is family and the migratory experience. The Irish built America, along with others.
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We have made it clear with European colleagues that our main interest is in Gaza and the Middle East in terms of contributing to peace.
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That will be the approach we will take.
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