Speeches: 28 April 2026

If you're doing a mini-budget in all but name, why not bring forward a coherent package?

The 11 billionaires we have in this country, a number that is growing each year, have the same amount of wealth as two thirds of the population.

Planning permissions don't deliver beds, viability delivers beds.

Disgraceful conditions for people who are doing an important service for democracy and for this house and nothing has been done about it.

the German authorities have decided to convict them under legislation that's reserved for organized crime, and are trying them now in a court which is normally reserved for terrorists and for organized criminals.

This is no country for young people, because you discriminate against young people in terms of their entitlement to the minimum wage.

I think it's an absolute disgrace that much of the benefits of offshore wind in this country are going to be given away to private for-profit companies, mostly from other countries.

So they are looking to meet you and the Senior Minister and I think we need to discuss their plight because their jobs have been replaced by the AI that they trained.

If the state has to make it viable for the private investor, why isn't the state just doing it itself?

When you see young people spending 26 hours a week in a car driving from the south east up to Dublin, that is so frustrating.

There is no constitutional or legal impediment which prevents parties who wish to exercise their right to collectively bargain from freely doing so in Ireland.

That doesn't point to a failure in rural Ireland, that points to success and I refute completely what the opposition has said about our policy and our commitment to rural Ireland.

Workers deserve fair pay, secure jobs and a stronger voice in the workplace.

Women deserve dignity, they deserve compassion and they deserve a healthcare system that addresses their needs rather than directing them to a ferry port.

We can't ask women to share their stories over and over again and not take action.

That volunteer spirit is what keeps Rural Ireland going.

A bigger budget will mean little if it doesn't reach the people, so let's make sure it does.

They are being asked to plan their futures, their homes and their businesses without seeing a single line of the law they are supposed to comply with.

The government's decision to delay the introduction of the living wage until 2029 sends an entirely wrong signal to workers.

we need to diversify the economy and to build a new economic model and to attract new strands of FDI.

We have an opportunity here to look at a public ownership model and I think the onus and the responsibility on us is to do that.

But on housing, we must confront the reality of Ireland's housing crisis and our competitiveness has been eroded by a system that cannot provide affordable accommodation for its workforce.

I shouldn't need to stand here and tell you that businesses up and down this country are really suffering from the energy crisis that the Tánaiste and your own party leader has acknowledged is the worst the world has ever seen.

Minister, towns and villages up and down the country are suffering from dereliction.

So my message to government tonight is everybody should have a right to have legal access to a union.

How can we credibly take on the European Presidency and guarantee the safety of senior government leaders who will be coming into this country?

Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have failed rural Ireland.

So we need to take a common sense practical approach to our rural planning that allows people to build close to home beside their parents so that when care needs arise in a home that the family are there to care for one another and that's something that's really really important in rural Ireland as well.

The voluntarist system simply does not work.

We believe it is essential to legislate to give workers and their trade unions the legal right to organise and to deliver a legal right to collective bargaining.

I like many others resent the comments by former Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, more or less saying that rural Ireland is a burden to the state.

If the employer can't carry on, he won't have the employees.

But the first thing that I'll say to you is, before the work starts in any man's land, or woman's, it should be paid for first.

If this bill inadvertently accelerates the movement towards larger sealed battery devices, then we will have succeeded in banning one product category while worsening the underlying environmental and safety risk.

The problem here is not charity and it is not goodwill. The problem is a hollowed-out state that no longer designs, manages or disciplines the system it funds.

This weekly struggle is not inevitable, it is the result of political choices.

Workers and families can't take this anymore Taoiseach, they can't wait any longer.

That is government taking a side, it's taking the side it has always taken, that is the side of the bosses.

The question is not about consultation. The question is whether government is willing to change direction.

No domestic sanctions, no leadership at EU level, no meaningful consequences from Ireland for Israel's actions, for its brazen contraventions of international law, for its genocide, Taoiseach.

We need to focus our policies, our actions, our budgets on people.

If they're not, I suppose, embracing it and looking at the digitalisation within their company, they're set to lose.

What I think needs to be focused on here is not a blanket ban on social media access for children per se, but as they have done in Australia, a ban on accounts being created by children, because it is when accounts are created that children on social media can be particularly targeted.

The new multi-annual financial framework must be set at a minimum commissioner of 1.27% of GNI, the money generated by EU individuals and businesses.

Enabling landlords to build shed sits with no planning permission, to rent them out with no legal protections, to evict tenants at any time with no right of repeal, with no reason, with no basis to go to the RTB.

The World Economic Forum is a place where billionaires, multi-millionaires gather together with heads of government and ministers and effectively it's a place where the policy interests of the billionaire class are transmitted to their political representatives, the likes of yourself.

We can't control what we don't own.

The policy has instead presided over a period of managed decline.

In an era when connectivity is as essential as electricity or clean water, the National Broadband Plan is reshaping the future of rural Ireland and ensuring that no community, no matter how remote, is left behind.

What we're trying to do is provide an out for people that are away from home and that connection and that identity piece so they're not moving away from home to play GAA worldwide that's for sure but we're trying to provide that kind of safe, solace, community base for people around the world.

Success from our point of view is a sustainable, local, thriving game.

I sometimes wonder and worry about the future that some of those communities have... to be able to make a successful application for any of the funding streams that I just mentioned.

What we might do is we might send this Jonathan submission and maybe the transcript of today's proceedings to the Department of Education, particularly to their inspectorate and ask them to give us some consideration.

This state is completely at odds with the rest of Europe in not recognising the right of trade union representation and collective bargaining.

Sustainable housing is the key to this, and for that we need infrastructure.

No business, no employer should have the right to build a business model that can only function when it provides a level of standards in terms of wages paying conditions that are not enough for people to be able to survive and live well.

As someone living in rural Ireland it is evident to me that the government has fallen significantly short in providing infrastructure resources investment needed to support and develop our communities and as a result people who live there are unfairly left to pay the price for government neglect.