Every time I come in here, I look across the benches and see where we cannot get delivery. I then look at communities where any time something is wanted or somebody is in trouble, people ask what they can do to help, even if they have not got it themselves. Yesterday, I was in Limerick. It is a tradition in Limerick that Fossett's Circus comes there. Fossett's Circus does a charity night, every time it comes to Limerick, for people just to go to see a circus. It offers a full night. It offered me tickets to give to agencies that want to go to see a circus. I go to different communities that offer the same but when it comes to governance, the same thing is not awarded. A crèche in Banogue is waiting for a letter from Uisce Éireann. The funding is there to build it to support the local school and local families who are working in the area. A letter from Uisce Éireann to say it will now upgrade the system is all that is wanted for the local authority to give the go-ahead. It has been going around in circles for three months now. People want to start it for the betterment of the community. We talk about where our tax is going and the minimum wage. I have no problem with a wage increase but if it does not make a difference in the pockets of the people getting it, I do have a problem with it. We see today that the minimum wage of €13.50 will be increased to €14.15, which will give a person an increase of €26. It is not an increase of €26, however, because of the tax bands. When the USC charge was lowered, the Government never moved the tax bands, so that person will pay more tax on it. When you break it down, take off the 1.5% auto-enrolment, which is also starting in January, and keep breaking it down, the person who will get the minimum wage increase is not getting an increase. What it does is drive inflation because people on the other side have to put up their costs. People asked me why the hospitality sector got a reduction in VAT. The hospitality sector is one of the cases where the minimum wage will come in. It will have four wage increases coming next January, in the short term. If you add that to the knock-on process of all the different wage increases across the sector, the 4% decrease it got will not add a cent to inflation. At the Committee on Budgetary Oversight that I chair, I asked people from the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council, IFAC, whether it would create an inflation cost; it would not. What it does is absorb the costs the sector has got in the past three years, and stops it increasing the price of food, beverages and everything within that sector. It was the right thing to do. I thank the Government for eventually doing it because, otherwise, it will be a circular economy. It will come back around to the same people who have got the wage increase paying more for the same product. We then look at every person who is paying PRSI and PAYE, who is also paying into the National Training Fund, but it does not actually go to funding national training. It goes around; it was voted on recently that it be used to buy up properties. It is taking from a fund for training people. That money has been sitting in accounts and building up for years. It could never be touched but now the Government wants it to go into something that is not based on training. We have a lot of very good projects that could be built. We talked about UHL today. I thank the Minister for saying that she is looking at options A and B, and all the sectors of it, but it is about the delivery of this. We are talking about 36 beds being delivered next year and it is hoped to increase that to 178 beds before 2030. The commercial sensitivity of getting extra lands is being talked about. We have also talked about developers saying they will build it on the same basis as a mortgage system, where they will build it, give it back, and it will cost a euro. If they do not have the funding to deliver it now, they will deliver the project within two years to help people save lives. How many more people's lives will it take before the Government listens to businesspeople and lets them deliver the infrastructure and buildings for it? It can then invest in the healthcare that needs to go into these buildings. How many more people will die before we do that? We are at Christmastime. I was at a funeral during the week. One person turned around to me after she buried her mother and said, "Please, please, please Richard, if you do anything, will you please sort out UHL?". A new CEO is coming in place. I hope and pray they have the capability to bring people with them to get the adequate staff that hospital needs. There is one accident and emergency department for 45,000 people. Hospitals were downgraded without thinking of the impact of an increasing population. That is recklessness. People are dying needlessly, while they are waiting for care. On the other side of that, people do not want to be employed by the hospital because of the stigma that was attached to it. Something radical needs to change. The management in place at the moment are trying to change it. They have been in contact with us in trying to change this but unless they get the proper staffing and proper people employed there, they cannot do that. It goes back to the question of how many more people have to die before the Government listens to people who can deliver infrastructure for it. I have been talking here about this, and I know the Minister has looked at certain parts of it. I will give him praise for what he does. He has listened to us talking about delivery of public versus private, and looking at budgets for delivery of public buildings that are privately built and then taken over by the public. We are looking at delivery of infrastructure that will then be given over to the likes of Uisce Éireann, where it will be built on time and on budget, making money travel further. We will get delivery faster. That is what it is about. Young people trying to get on the property ladder have moved in with their parents. Under the laws that are there, even if they have a modular unit out the back at the moment, they are being penalised by the local authority because the Bill, for people trying to move home to try to save to get on the housing ladder, has not gone through the House yet. We are going to introduce modular units at the back of houses, which will hopefully come about early next year, but the Government has only allowed an extra 5 sq. m to the planning guidelines when a two-bed apartment is 63 sq. m. We have asked the Government to bring it up to 63 sq. m to allow for liveable accommodation. If elderly people said they would move into the modular unit to let the family move into their house, it would not be big enough to accommodate them either because the Government does not have the foresight to allow for a two-bedroom unit to be built on-site, which would be 63 sq. m. We are now looking at 45 sq. m. Will it not look at this again? What happens if a person living in the modular unit gets sick and somebody has to move in to take care of them? What happens if a carer is coming in to take care of an elderly parent? It is simple legislation. Listen to the people who know about it. Our budgets have to be costed from now on by people who deliver on time, pay taxes and make profits. The Minister and Minister of State have to cost their Department's delivery of infrastructure, whether it is housing or any development. Costings have to be evenly based across the board to make sure their Department is accountable. That means they could deliver more for less.

Sentiment score: 0.08