Paul Gavan (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I want to raise two issues. The first is a lady whose name has been mentioned a number of times, rightly so. I refer to the courage of Natasha O'Brien, who was the victim of an horrific assault by a member of our armed services. People have spoken very eloquently about her courage and bravery. I want to highlight the horrendous social media campaign against her in the past couple of weeks. There have been the most horrendous attacks on her personally and scurrilous comments about her. There has been nonsense about there being more to the story.

I dug a little further to have a look at the people who are making these comments and see what they had in common. What they had in common is that they are part of the Ireland is full, anti-Palestinian, Islamophobia, which we know is widespread across social media, and anti-LGBT brigades. There is a message of hatred washing across social media. Even in circumstances where a poor woman was beaten nearly to within an inch of her life, they think they can attack her. We need to call this out.

I am genuinely very worried, as I know others are, about the culture of it now being somehow acceptable to have violence against a woman. We need a debate on this. When we come back after the summer - we are not sure how long we will come back for - I urge the Leader to prioritise this for an early debate because all of us need to call it out, not just the actions but who these people are and what else they represent. Not all of us know who these people are and what they do. Most of us come across them on social media and sometimes in person. All of us need to be stronger and call that out.

The second issue I want to raise is one that has come up again in the past couple of days, namely, early years education. I do not like referring to it as childcare because it is much more valuable than that. A SIPTU presentation here last week told us that there is a 25% turnover in the sector. Workers are caught in a cycle of low pay, a staffing crisis and increased stress and burnout. It is a particularly challenging time for them. I want to be fair. The Minister, Deputy Roderic O'Gorman, deserves some credit for establishing an employment regulation order, ERO. However, not enough has been done. The rate of pay in the sector is still incredibly low.

There is a fundamental point we will need to discuss. I heard others yesterday speak about the pressure on small businesses. I accept that, but surely we need to talk about why we do not have a publicly provided early years education service. Is there an ideological objection to that? It came up in the debate in the audiovisual room last week. Does the Government see a small business model as being the appropriate model for providing early years education? Certainly, I do not. We would never suggest that we provide national school education via a small business model, so why are we the laggards in Europe? Across Europe, there is publicly provided childcare and early years education. That is what we need here and it is why we need a debate on the topic.