Speeches: 12 May 2026

I think the risk is certainly there and that's the risk that will have to be managed.

The message you're sending ordinary people, you're on your own, we've made our choice.

It's scary, quite frankly, that they're talking about recruitment embargoes as a response to essentially their failure to acknowledge the amount of money that they need to put into health service and into backing our nurses and our other health care workers.

ambulance workers feel they had no choice but to go on strike because of the failure of the government to recognise they are vital health care professionals.

We're being listened to but we're not being heard.

I think it is an absolute disgrace that Jack Chambers and this government are threatening essentially a return to austerity and cutbacks across departments and trying to imply that because extra money had to be found for special needs that that's why this has to be done.

We need to take that sector back under into public control.

We had the lowest electricity prices when the ESB had a not-for-profit mandate, and it was entirely state controlled.

so this is a minimal step to say young people doing apprenticeships or young people generally should not be paid less than the minimum wage and that should be a legal right and entitlement.

It is an obligation we have and calls for comprehensive economic, financial and trade sanctions against a state that is guilty of genocidal actions.

When we support and empower our nurses, particularly those working on the front line of mental health care, we strengthen our entire health system.

Our words do matter and language does matter.

The blame lies squarely with a government that expects an ambulance service to run on fumes and workers' goodwill.

Nurses are often the very first point of contact and most enduring point of contact for patients.

If we are serious about protecting our health service, we must invest in the workforce that sustains it.

Taoiseach, the prospect of 720 job losses at Covalen has caused enormous anxiety for workers and their families and our existing legislation around statutory redundancy is no longer adequate.

Most people in Ireland are deeply alarmed by those measures of this nature, further undermining the prospects for peace and accountability.

Ireland's energy rip-off is the result of political choices made by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael to protect corporate profits instead of working people and families and Sinn Féin is saying tonight enough is enough.

Ordinary workers and families are being fleeced by energy companies making eye-watering profits.

The data is there, it's just not being published.

Heat and power are not luxuries, they are basic necessities that should not cause households to spiral into debt.

I'm asking you, Minister, to look at this again, in a favourable way.

These nurses, we need them and we need that they're seen after and paid and remunerated properly.

I suppose the worst thing that's going on now with the energy companies, there's so many of them, and they're making fortunes on the backs of poor people, and even of working class people, and businesses, small businesses and so forth.

So I'm asking you here Minister, do you know when the hospital is going to open?

Decisions of this scale were taken quietly and implemented without any regard for the basic principle that communities deserve to know what is happening in their own estates.

I would just simply ask for consistency, because at present, the difficulty seems to lie less in the question than in settling on a reason not to answer it.

We're now over a month since the fuel protest and not a single cent of the government's fuel subsidy has been paid out to farmers and contractors.

Dialogue is the only way and the only mechanism to resolve this dispute and I would appeal for people to re-engage.

You ask ambulance workers to upskill and then refuse to pay for it properly.

They're supposed to be looking after the integrated market north and south, but charges and prices have only gone up ever since this introduction of this new body.

Only by attacking these areas together can we deliver lasting reductions in electricity costs for households and businesses across the country.

If it boils down to one word, it's respect.

We commit to ensuring sustained government support for the area.

Do you intend to meet with them alongside the First Minister and Deputy First Minister of the North to discuss future relationships and cooperation?

Taoiseach, we need retrofitting as quickly and as much as possible.

Surely it's a contradiction to say that Israel is committing genocide and then spend your time trying to ensure that we do nothing to actually punish or impact or prevent the continuation of that genocide.

It's a bill to end the super-exploitation of young workers and apprentices.

Are you in favour of, do you say that autonomous things, autonomous systems are precisely what these organisations need?

The short answer is no, no, it's nothing we, our group has developed has been used by military anywhere.

To the many thousands of our nurses who have been forced to emigrate by the failed policies of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, I want you to know this, we will work to build the conditions that give you the real choice to return home with secure housing and a good quality of life.

It is obscene and extremely unfair on households and on businesses who are absolutely struggling to survive, and yet it goes on and on.

In light of this, any changes to CRU's mandate right now would be premature.

If you want to become a nurse you should fund them the same.

Everything that you've done, you've only benefited the electricity suppliers.

If you cap the fuel at 170, and if the fuel cost did go up, you pay the increase in the cost of the fuel, but you don't pay tax on the increase.

People are choosing between heating and eating.

This is why I talk about radical empathy, because you really need to put yourselves in the shoes of the Israeli government, of what they're thinking, of what is driving not just their position, but what are the interests behind it.

I suppose I have concerns, huge ones... when the DPC have expressed such very serious concerns that now is not the time to be adding to legislation, in fact now is the time to be pausing that to reflect.

We should be moving urgently towards safe staffing legislation, real enforceable ratios so that every nurse can finish a shift knowing they gave the standard of care they trained so hard to deliver.

I want to add my voice of thanks to them, the wonderful nursing staff right around the country, for what they do to keep the clock ticking, as it were, on life.

I think it's really important that when we talk about nurses today that we're not just focusing on the nurses who work in acute hospitals and they are incredibly important to the conversation but we also recognize the nurses in the nursing homes, in primary care clinics, in GP practices, the community midwives and of course our public health nurses as well.

The physical emotional pressures that they come under caring for patients every day cannot be underestimated.