Lisa Chambers (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Last week in the Chamber a number of colleagues spoke about Ireland's energy supply. At the weekend there were reports from the Minister for the Environment, Climate and Communication, Deputy Eamon Ryan, that Ireland is facing a tight few years until 2025 in terms of our energy supplies and that engineers were undergoing training for potential blackouts this winter. This is a really serious situation that I am sure has caused much concern right across the board. People are wondering what we are going to do to address the issue. The year 2025 is quite a distance away. It is a long time to be planning to have a deficiency in energy supplies to meet the demands of our citizens. It would be important to get an update from the Minister at the earliest opportunity on that particular issue, especially his comments on the tight supplies that Ireland is facing into for the next four years.

I also want to raise the issue of mica and pyrite homeowners which, as people will know, is a big issue, in particular in Mayo and Donegal where many homeowners are facing substantial rebuild costs for their homes. The current scheme is not fit for purpose for these homeowners. We have heard many tales of families who are devastated and have had to move out of their homes where they can afford to do so. Other families have had to demolish their homes and are living in mobile homes while they try to get the money together to rebuild what were family homes. I hope the issue can be resolved and I urge the Minister to find every way possible to provide 100% redress for those families to make sure they can rebuild their family homes. It is a devastating situation for them to be in.

The final issue I want to raise is the conversation that is currently happening around a bonus payment, a thank you payment or some sort of offering to those workers who were on the front line during the Covid pandemic, how that should work and what form it should take. I mean no disrespect to any front-line worker. Many people worked extremely hard over the past year and a half, in particular those in public-facing jobs. There is a need to differentiate between those who worked in healthcare and looked after Covid patients. I am thinking of a family member of mine. In the early part of the pandemic we were genuinely worried that when she went to work she would get very sick and die. That was how serious the situation was in the early part of the pandemic. Front-line healthcare workers, in particular, went into work every day literally fighting face-to-face with Covid. There were scenes from other countries, in particular Italy, of healthcare workers in full PPE who still got sick and died.There were people who literally risked their lives every day to keep the health service on the road and keep the show going. While not discounting the work done by people working in delivery, retail services or any other job like that, there is a distinct group of people who made great sacrifices and took great risks. Very early on in the pandemic we did not know what we know now and we did not know whether people would be fully protected even wearing full gear. Yet every day, they crossed the threshold of hospitals or home care settings to look after patients who had Covid-19. All of these people were incredibly brave and if all these workers are offered is a bank holiday then that is a huge insult to the risks they took during the pandemic to keep people alive, to keep the rest of us safe and to stop the health service from crumbling. I suggest and request that this particular cohort of workers be put in a distinct category separate from everybody else and that the risks to their lives that they undertook be acknowledged.