Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

As we have been stating for weeks now, it is completely unacceptable that the Government is using the Covid crisis to shield itself from legitimate questioning and accountability on a range of pressing issues for people in this country by limiting time for debates, questions to An Taoiseach and, critically, the pandemic, thus breaking a commitment that there would be a standing debate on Covid and dealing with the pandemic. It is outrageous.

I want to mention a specific item on today's order, namely, the Land Development Agency Bill 2021. We will discuss the substance of that Bill later, which I believe is a heist of the public land banks in the interests of private developers. This Bill, which by any standards is probably one of the most important Bills that will come before this House in the foreseeable future, did not go through pre-legislative scrutiny and no waiver was sought from the Business Committee for a Bill that deals with the entire public land bank. That is unacceptable.

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