Darragh O'Brien (Fianna Fail)

The Deputy Leader will have informed the Leader that there was no Minister present to hear our Private Members' motion last Wednesday. All sides of the House agreed this was a very unwelcome departure and not good enough. Has the Leader had a response from the Chief Whip or the Taoiseach's office in regard to this? Can he confirm to me and my colleagues on all sides of the House that this will not recur? While I look forward to debating the Private Members' motion this evening, I would like to hear an update on what occurred last week.

We are to take Second Stage of the Finance Bill today and the debate tomorrow is to be open-ended, which I welcome. We ask that the Leader facilitate us, as he has done with other Bills, to allow us to table recommendations until 10 a.m. tomorrow morning. We need to hear what the Minister has to say in the House today. Will the Leader facilitate us? We insist that we be given adequate time to respond to Second Stage.

I asked the week before last about the pyrite committee the Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government, Deputy Phil Hogan, set up on 15 September 2011. Up to 72,500 houses, predominantly on the east coast, could be affected by the pyrite problem. How many times has the committee met? When does the Government expect to receive a report from it? Every week that the problem continues to feature and action is delayed, an increasing number of people will be statutorily barred as the statute of limitations applies only for six years. HomeBond has washed its hands of the matter. I intend to raise this matter regularly.

The Leader and all fair-minded colleagues across the House will agree that the Government's management of the household charge has been a debacle. Fair-minded members of Government parties, such as Deputy John Deasy and Deputy Ciarán Lynch, have called it a fiasco. I agree with them. We have said so. The legislation was rushed. There is a court challenge over the fact that, once again, legislation is not being translated into the first official language, Irish. With regard to the public information campaign, the first radio advertisements were last week. The low rate of payment of the charge among the public is not just because people do not want to pay it; it is also because they do not know how to pay it. Last week, the Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government said he would allow payment at post offices but that will not be the case now. Anyone looking at this with a cold eye would say the whole manner in which the Government has gone about collecting the household charge has been nothing short of pathetic.

The Minister's public utterances, unlike some of his private utterances on golf courses in Connemara which we will not go into today, on the household charge have left me with no confidence that the Department can manage this. I want to hear directly from the Minister as to whether he will allow an extension of the payment date. To help him out of this bunker, he should extend the payment deadline to the end of April.

Accordingly, I am tabling an amendment to the Order of Business that the Minster for the Environment, Community and Local Government, Deputy Hogan, attend the House to advise the Seanad as to his proposals to ensure there is as much compliance with the household charge as possible. I must remind the Government, we tabled a series of exemptions which were all defeated. The charge has turned into a fiasco.