I will follow on from Senator Craughwell's comments regarding the emails, which I am sure everyone will have received, in respect of the Leader's comments last week. These comments were in response to comments I made to her in respect of the digital Covid certificate. I just want to show support for the comments she made. Everything the Government is doing in bringing forward measures is meant to protect people, people's lives and industries. The comments made in emails such as those we have received are also made by some public representatives. I know of one in Tipperary who takes a populist view and calls the measures discriminatory, medical apartheid and rubbish like that when all we are trying to do is protect people. I support the Leader in the comments she made last week.

I ask her for a debate with the Minister for Rural and Community Development at some point. I do not recall us having such a debate previously. I would like to discuss the funding of projects under the rural regeneration and development fund. There was good news yesterday for a number of projects that received extra funding. There were two such projects in County Tipperary. A project in Thurles got an extra €500,000 on top of the €3 million it has received to develop a permanent structure for a farmers' market. That is a really good project for the centre of the town.

There is a problem with the rural regeneration and development fund that we need to work to solve. In the latest round of applications, a contingency of approximately 25% was allowed for to take into account the changes in material and development costs to get projects from start to finish. In previous rounds, there was only a contingency of 5%. Some of those projects are only starting now but what they will now cost to complete is far greater than the funding sought from the Department, even with that 5% contingency funding. I ask for a debate with the Minister to discuss increasing the contingency funding to 25% for those applications made in previous rounds, which is what new applications are to receive.

I stand in solidarity with and support the Leader in her remarks. Last Sunday, Daniel Murray published an article in the Business Post with the headline "Government to defer legislating for international surrogacy services". I appreciate that there is momentum and that hard work is going on behind the scenes. I probably know more than most about just how much is going on and how many meetings and so on are taking place. The Ministers from the Departments of Justice, Health and Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth have met five times in the past year to move this along, because it is within those three Departments that needs and issues have arisen. However, headlines like that and the repeated delays do nothing but cause fear and horror for families across the country whose children were born via surrogacy.

It is not that there has not been an incredibly ethical framework put forward that safeguards the rights of children and puts them first and that safeguards the human rights of the surrogates and parents. There are women around this country who are not entitled to sign permission slips for their children in school and who have been rejected and told that they are not the mothers of their children. There are children who are being teased about this in school. There are children who were born via surrogacy who are shortly to turn 18, because that is how long this has been going on in this country, and who will now never have that legal relationship with their parents because they will be adults. Mothers are being denied legal connection with their children and children are being denied legal recognition of their relationship with their mothers and the provisions regarding inheritance from parents and grandparents that flow from that. The delay is appalling. Will the Leader please write to the Ministers to seek clarification and to urge that legislation be hastened through and that under no circumstances should the Bill on assisted human reproduction registration be published without surrogacy, both domestic and international, being comprehensively addressed?

I echo the comments in support of the Leader on the remarks she made last week. She is 100% correct and I fully stand by and support her comments. I also support Senator Ahearn's remarks with regard to rural regeneration projects. In my own county, projects have had to be redesigned because of rising costs. Even this redesigning to bring the projects in line with the funding approved comes at a cost. I support the Senator's comments. I welcome the funding announced for a project in Ballymahon. It is a major project and has received additional funding but, as I have said, other projects are struggling.

I will raise the issue of hospice beds, which I have raised previously. There is just one hospice bed in County Longford to cover a population of 40,000 people. We raised this issue with the then Minister for Health, Deputy Harris, when he was on a visit a number of years ago before the redesign of the St. Joseph's campus. We secured agreement for an additional bed but now the HSE is not prepared to follow through on it.

I will read a couple of lines from a letter I got back from the Health Service Executive when I asked about the two beds. It states:

Such a decision will also have a financial impact on the unit, reducing the income to the unit through the fair deal scheme and increasing the cost of care. Any commitment to increasing the number of palliative care beds at the expense of a long-stay bed would have to be accompanied by an appropriate budgetary allocation to compensate for the fair deal income reduction in order to maintain services for the current and future residents in St. Joseph's care centre.

We are putting a cost on placing an additional care bed for people with hospice needs. I do not have the exact figures but I am seeking to get them officially so I can put them on the record. We have way in excess of the average number of hours of hospice care going into homes because we do not have that additional hospice care bed for families in our county. That is not acceptable.