Feargal Quinn (Independent)

I intended raising the issue raised by Senator Regan and others on alcohol. One of the points that emerges from the research is that the image of Ireland is tainted by the amount of alcohol consumed, and the question of how we can handle it. It will be difficult for us to deal with controls on advertising and sponsorship in Ireland alone if we do not manage to get some level of agreement on it in Europe. Steps are being taken in Europe in that regard. We did lead the way with tobacco and we can do the same with alcohol by influencing what is done in Europe as well.

I will not repeat the figures but what surprised me is how high we were in the statistics for alcohol consumption and the amount of hospital care that was required as a result of it. It emerged that alcohol caused 4.4% of deaths in this country while the rate in the United Kingdom was 3.1% and in Sweden it was 3.5%. That is only part of the results.

I have one other point to make on the image of Ireland. The child abuse publicity will damage our image abroad. The sentencing yesterday on corruption charges introduced me to another table I had not seen previously, namely, the corruption perception index, which shows that Ireland's identity overseas has worsened considerably since the revelations of the planning tribunal. It is worthwhile recognising that we must take action even though sometimes those actions are not something we welcome doing.

It frustrates me to see money being spent on things unnecessarily. Recently in Britain a significant amount of money was spent to discover that 94% of train passengers get annoyed when trains are not punctual. There was much criticism over spending such an amount of money to discover that. Yesterday, the consumer panel of the Financial Regulator published its report, which found that most customers have lost considerable sums of money. The report found that the Financial Regulator has been deficient to date. I wonder how much money was spent for us to discover that.