Paul Lawless (Mayo, Aontú) | Oireachtas source

I am grateful for the opportunity to speak on the programme for Government. I am a new, young TD and I am eager to get to work and deliver for my constituency and this great country, but I am very disappointed with the length of time it has taken to produce this programme for Government and form a Government. The Dáil has sat only five of the past 70 days since my election on 29 November. The culture of breaks and holidays in this House needs to end. This House needs to show the urgency that the Government and the party of the Minister of State, Deputy Higgins, showed over the election campaign. I was shocked to learn that this House closes on the Tuesday following a bank holiday weekend, as well as on the Monday itself.

I welcome many aspects of the programme for Government but it is very weak and vague. Some of the detail is just not there. The word "review", for example, appears 126 times in the 160-page document. Dublin is mentioned 29 times, while Mayo is not mentioned at all. The word "east" is mentioned 23 times, while the word "west" appears just nine times, and some of those refer to the West Bank and west Dublin. The programme for Government neglects the west. We see this also in the geographical spread of the Cabinet, with 60% of Ministers located in the greater Dublin area, while Connacht and Ulster have just one senior Minister between them. It struck me last week, the week of power outages, while examining the power outage map and the ministerial geographical spread, that on every front there was no power in the west. The power has been confined to Dublin. This needs to change. We need to see a serious commitment from the Government to addressing the east-west divide in this country.

Getting back to the vagueness of the document, on disabilities, for example, it is clear its authors found the easiest ways to cut corners to make it look like the Government was doing something. It is going to, for example, work to end the practice of placing young people with disabilities in nursing homes. The authors do not explain how or set targets. The Government is also going to examine the criteria for inclusion in the travel assistance scheme but does not pledge to change the scheme, just to look at it.

There is little concrete action in the document. In regard to the EU-Mercosur deal, for example, the Government promises to work with like-minded EU countries to oppose it. Setting aside the fact Fine Gael voted for the deal in 2019, will the Minister of State tell me what countries she has contacted or canvassed to oppose it? The deal will cause untold damage throughout rural Ireland and have huge consequences for small family farms in my constituency and elsewhere across the west. Where are the Greens in this debate? The deal will encourage forest fires, deforestation and overgrazing in South America, not to mention the significant carbon cost of transporting poor-quality beef over such distances.

In respect of the EU restoration law, I welcome the fact the programme for Government states that this will be voluntary, but will the Minister of State explain how the Government is going to ensure this? I do not see how we can do so unless we are, in fact, going to mount a legal challenge to the deal.

As for housing, I welcome the Government's proposal to build 300,000 houses over its lifetime, but there is no detail about how this is going to be achieved. In recent weeks, it emerged that the Government failed to meet its own modest target of 30,000, so how are we going to move from a target of 30,000 to 60,000? How is that going to be achieved? In the run-up to the general election, the Government misled the public about its targets by indicating, in the weeks leading up to it, that it would deliver 40,000, when the truth is it did not even deliver the target of 30,000 or thereabouts.

This programme for Government is aspirational but very weak on detail and how it is going to be achieved. How can we believe anything in it, especially in light of the electioneering that went on regarding the housing targets in recent weeks?

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