Regina Doherty (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I will be fast. The Taoiseach is incredibly welcome to the Seanad. As the Cathaoirleach pointed out, he has held a number of offices in what can only be described as a very long and distinguished public record, starting off in Cork and rising all of the way through the ranks to Taoiseach. I am very pleased that he is my Taoiseach. It is an honour for me to be his representative in this House, and I thank him for giving me that honour.

As the Taoiseach alluded to, politics can be very adversarial, in particular when people are on different sides of the House. We suddenly become friends when we are on the same side of House. I can genuinely say that I have admired the Taoiseach for many years, not least because of his stance on certain issues. For me, the measure of a man or woman is how he or she treats somebody in private. He well knows how much I respect him for the way he treated Máiría Cahill when she was the subject of major trauma and was reliving that trauma because of the actions of other parties. I want to put on the record that I am very grateful for how the Taoiseach treats people in private as well as his public persona, and thank him for that.

I would also like to thank him for the particular attention he pays to men's mental and good health. He is aware from recent statistics of the major problem we have in this country. We have some wonderful organisations in the State which respond to people who are having mental health difficulties or are going through bad periods of their lives. Young men from the ages of 20 to 41 are not in the catchment group that we are helping because they are not coming forward for help. Unfortunately, when we look at the statistics on suicide they are the people who are being successful. Our success should be measured in our direct approach to young men in campaigns and reaching out. I ask the Taoiseach to sincerely engage with the Minister of State, Deputy Mary Butler, who is doing a wonderful job in running specific campaigns for our farming community, men and women who are incarcerated in our prisons around the country and, in particular, young men between the ages of 20 to 40. We need to find ways to reach them in ways that we are not currently doing.

I want to commend the Taoiseach on his shared island approach. I know for how long he has felt that we needed to change our approach to how we interact with our citizens on all parts of this island. It is a welcome and novel approach and the most important thing he has done is to listen. It is sometimes a mistake for politicians to think that we need to be heard, when a lot of the time we have two ears and one mouth and do not use them accordingly. The Taoiseach has shown leadership by listening to and engaging with people in the North of Ireland, and I want to acknowledge and commend him for that.

I want to welcome the fact that, as part of the programme for Government, the Taoiseach has brought forward a Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science. Education is the ground-breaking equaliser. That can be said to be true of some the difficulties we have had in Northern Ireland. Having had the privilege of being Minister for Social Protection for a number of years, I know the equaliser that is missing in areas of deprivation is access to opportunities in education. I want to commend the Taoiseach for ensuring that everybody will have equality of opportunity. However, I want to ask him to specifically examine lifelong learning, in particular for women who have left the workforce. We need women to be mothers, parents, rear their children and have special relationships, but when those women want to come back to work and suffer a crisis of confidence we need to be there for them. It is something we started a number of years ago, but because of Covid that has probably been interrupted. We need to consider returnships and confidence rebuilding. A major way to do that for women is through education. I ask the Taoiseach to examine the objectives of the EPSCO Council with regard to lifelong learning and, if he could, to put some money behind that into third level institutions.

I would probably do myself a disservice if I did not talk about antigen testing and Covid today. I am not trying to be disrespectful to anybody and I do not envy the men and women who are making the decisions in our best interests, and have done so for the past 20 months. However, antigen screening has a place in society. The paternalistic language being used by some of our advisers is not going down well. Antigen testing certainly has a place for those who are walking around while asymptomatic. There are six of them for every one Covid positive person who has been caught by our public health response. We need to change our attitude. I ask the Taoiseach to reconsider this and make a political decision to roll out antigen tests so that all asymptomatic people can curb their behaviour when they find they are positive. Right now, with a lack of testing we have asymptomatic people going around the country not knowing that they have Covid.

I ask the Taoiseach to consider medical exemptions for those whom we acknowledge cannot take a vaccine. I have a pal who is 12 years old and has Down's syndrome. He is petrified. His mammy cannot make him take the vaccine, but he is being excluded from activities in school and the Special Olympics, and has now been told that he will be excluded from his Christmas pantomime. It is just not fair. I know we are trying to encourage people who have other fears to take the vaccine. This is a little man, and there are plenty of people with medical exemptions who are owed a service to make sure that they are fully included in society.