Results 38,141-38,160 of 40,330 for speaker:Leo Varadkar

Ministerial Rota for Parliamentary Questions: Motion: Cabinet Committees (29 Mar 2023)

Leo Varadkar: I am glad that it is on the record of the House that the Deputy is not supportive of Cuba. I thank him.

Ministerial Rota for Parliamentary Questions: Motion: Cabinet Committees (29 Mar 2023)

Leo Varadkar: I thank the Deputy. That is a revelation. I do apologise and withdraw-----

Ministerial Rota for Parliamentary Questions: Motion: Cabinet Committees (29 Mar 2023)

Leo Varadkar: I do apologise and withdraw it if I was mistaken in ever thinking that Deputy Smith and Deputy Boyd Barrett were ever supporters of Cuba.

Ministerial Rota for Parliamentary Questions: Motion: Cabinet Committees (29 Mar 2023)

Leo Varadkar: They have confirmed that they have never been supporters of Cuba. It is on the record of the House today. I have no problem or objection and I welcome peaceful protest. A number of Deputies referred to the motion of confidence. I note that we won by a margin of almost 20. We did not need the votes of Independent Deputies, but we had quite a lot of them, which is very welcome, and I...

Ministerial Rota for Parliamentary Questions: Motion: Cabinet Committees (29 Mar 2023)

Leo Varadkar: I think there are pros and cons. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that when the Government or the public sector builds something that it takes longer and costs more. That may be for very good reasons. It might be because the workers have better pensions or pay and because we have to go through certain public procedures, but it probably is the case that if the Government does...

Ministerial Rota for Parliamentary Questions: Motion: Cabinet Committees (29 Mar 2023)

Leo Varadkar: It might also displace workers and displace development from the private sector at a higher cost and take longer. We need to bear those things in mind too when we make decisions.

Ministerial Rota for Parliamentary Questions: Motion: Cabinet Committees (29 Mar 2023)

Leo Varadkar: I answered twice already in previous sessions.

Ministerial Rota for Parliamentary Questions: Motion: Cabinet Committees (29 Mar 2023)

Leo Varadkar: I am happy to respond to the Deputy's questions. I am at a slight disadvantage here in that it takes much longer to answer a question than to ask it. I may need the entire remainder of this session to do so.

Ministerial Rota for Parliamentary Questions: Motion: Cabinet Committees (29 Mar 2023)

Leo Varadkar: I was asked about emergency accommodation. There is more emergency accommodation coming on stream. As I have always said, emergency accommodation is not a solution. It is only a backstop and it is only a temporary solution that some people need sometimes. In many cases, it is for a few weeks or a few months. It is certainly our objective that if anyone needs emergency accommodation it...

Ministerial Rota for Parliamentary Questions: Motion: Cabinet Committees (29 Mar 2023)

Leo Varadkar: Sometimes it can be, but it is not usually for years. It is mostly for less than a year.

Ministerial Rota for Parliamentary Questions: Motion: Cabinet Committees (29 Mar 2023)

Leo Varadkar: As Deputy Boyd Barrett knows, it is often the case that when we drill into those individual cases it can be quite a complicated story. In some cases people have been offered social housing and they have not accepted it, perhaps for good reasons, and in other cases they may not be entitled to social housing at all. An increasing feature of people in emergency accommodation is that they do...

Ministerial Rota for Parliamentary Questions: Motion: Cabinet Committees (29 Mar 2023)

Leo Varadkar: What happens is a very practical, fair and humanitarian thing. If a case comes before a judge and a person is facing eviction into homelessness, what a judge will often do – it is up to them to hear all sides of the case and do the kind of thing we do not allow ourselves to do in this House – is to say they are not issuing the order for eviction and that they are going to allow...

Ministerial Rota for Parliamentary Questions: Motion: Cabinet Committees (29 Mar 2023)

Leo Varadkar: It would be interesting for them to ask the question of how many eviction orders are issued by the courts every year in Ireland. Thankfully, in Ireland, unlike in many other countries, getting an eviction order from the courts, which is the only place one can get an eviction order from, is not that easy. In regard to how the decision was made by the Cabinet, it was made on the...

Ministerial Rota for Parliamentary Questions: Motion: Cabinet Committees (29 Mar 2023)

Leo Varadkar: For lots of reasons. That was the basis for the decision.

Ministerial Rota for Parliamentary Questions: Motion: Cabinet Committees (29 Mar 2023)

Leo Varadkar: In regard to the modelling question, which I have answered on numerous occasions, this is an area that is almost impossible to model statistically. First, there are lots of reasons people end up homeless in emergency accommodation, for example, family breakdown. There is no way of statistically modelling how many families are going to break down in the next month or the next six months.

Ministerial Rota for Parliamentary Questions: Motion: Cabinet Committees (29 Mar 2023)

Leo Varadkar: It is not something that is possible to do accurately.

Ministerial Rota for Parliamentary Questions: Motion: Cabinet Committees (29 Mar 2023)

Leo Varadkar: We have seen an increasing number of families presenting for emergency accommodation who are not citizens of the State.

Ministerial Rota for Parliamentary Questions: Motion: Cabinet Committees (29 Mar 2023)

Leo Varadkar: There are all sorts of different people with all sorts of different stories. There is no way to accurately model that. There is also no way to accurately model the number of notices of termination that will result in eviction orders, for example.

Ministerial Rota for Parliamentary Questions: Motion: Cabinet Committees (29 Mar 2023)

Leo Varadkar: We are trying to do that all the time but to accurately project it is very difficult for anyone to do. I am not aware of any instructions given to the Garda in regard to this.

Ministerial Rota for Parliamentary Questions: Motion: Cabinet Committees (29 Mar 2023)

Leo Varadkar: To help the Deputy, I do not know the answer to that question but will check and return to him.