Darragh O'Brien (Fianna Fail)

The Leader has just dealt with one of my questions which he will be glad to hear will shorten my contribution. I have raised this matter on a few occasions. I welcome that we have a date now for the Minister to come into the House for a debate on mortgages, even if it is a month from now. The ongoing mortgage crisis is an important issue on which there was agreement across the House on the part of the many Members who contributed to that debate.

Is there any news as to when the community employment scheme review is due? A number of reports are pending but they were not published in the past week and I wonder if that was one of them. When that report is published I ask the Leader to afford time for it to be debated.

Regarding the pyrite committee report, in her role as Deputy Leader, Senator Bacik said that the Government had hoped to get that report published by the end of May. We are only a week past that but we had a target date originally of the end of March. As I said previously, approximately 72,000 houses are potentially affected, mainly on the east coast. I visited many people in my constituency whose houses are in a desperate state of disrepair and who have had the legs cut from under them, so to speak, by HomeBond, which now says it has no liability in this regard. Does the Leader have a date for the publication of that report? When we have had an opportunity to examine that report it is important that we have a debate on how we will assist hundreds of thousands of people across this country who have no safety net in this regard and who are living in houses that are unsafe and will continue to pay mortgages on houses that are effectively valueless. That is a major challenge for all of us across the House in terms of the way the State deals with that issue.

I record my support for the call by the Minister of State, Deputy Brian Hayes, last Sunday that Sinn Féin would pay for the cost of the High Court challenge to the Referendum Commission's comments, the public relations stunt it engaged in two days before polling that will cost the taxpayer in the region of €200,000. I ask the Leader to ask our colleagues in Sinn Féin whether Sinn Féin can confirm that it will leave that bill with the taxpayers or-----