Regina Doherty (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank colleagues for affording me the few minutes to speak today. We have one dog at home. She is a goldendoodle, and she came from Wexford. As she was a little ball of red fluff when we got her - she was supposed to stay a little ball of red fluff - we called her Rua. She is now about 4 ft tall and has a tail that can only be described as a weapon of mass destruction. One would be having a glass of wine and the tail would come in and knock the glass. We love her to bits and she sits at the window waiting for us to come home, particularly the boys when they are gone to school or college. She is part of our family, and it is unfortunate to think and see how people do not love dogs the way people today have described how they love their dogs. It is a crime.

Skirting through the newspapers this morning, we have a Covid puppy boom, a tsunami of unwanted dogs, and cost-of-living abandonment that has soared by 73% since the Covid-19 pandemic. We have over 100 dogs abandoned per day, and in Wicklow, over one hour, there were apparently 16. Yet we are here going to wait for the perfect from the Minister, Deputy McConalogue, instead of taking what is incredibly good to fix the problems that we all know and that are available. I will ask, from a political perspective, for us not to wait for the perfect and that when the Minister brings this Bill to the Dáil, he can make the amendments that he wants to make. Right now we have thousands of people in this country whose dogs are not microchipped, do not even have a licence, and are being mistreated and abandoned. It is now that we need to do something, and not wait for the perfect.