Mary White (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I would like to raise again the very serious matter of the Irish-Russian adoption crisis about which I spoke last week. Last evening, Ms Lisa Fennessy and her husband Michael, and Ms Marie Hunt, representing the Russian-Irish Adoption Group, met with the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs, Deputy Frances Fitzgerald, to seek the Minister's help in resolving the Irish-Russian adoption crisis. Sadly, however, no progress was made towards resolving this crisis at the meeting with the Minister. Some of the Irish couples have already travelled to Russia, have bonded and fallen in love with the babies and were in the process of completing the adoptions when they were informed that the Russian Government had changed the rules of engagement for adoption. For the Irish families involved, time is running out and they are devastated at the lack of movement on the appropriate legislative amendment. I would like the Leader to ask the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs, Deputy Frances Fitzgerald, for immediate legal clarity on the delay in this amendment.

As I said yesterday, the devil is in the detail of budget 2014. All the hurt and crisis and pain that this budget will cause everybody is surfacing today in the newspapers. Members on the other side of the House glowed with contentment yesterday because they felt this was a very special, soft budget. As the hours pass and the budget is exposed to the cold light of day, its illusions, I regret to say, become more transparent. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the much-trumpeted €500 million tax package with 25 new measures to support entrepreneurs and create jobs. It appears that the bulk of the €500 million comes from the continuation of the 9% VAT rate, which over the past few weeks I so valiantly and continuously pushed to retain, rather than being a new provision. The way to create a brilliant tax boost is to threaten an end to an existing tax benefit and then retain it and count it as a new tax incentive in the next budget.