Kieran O'Donnell (Limerick City, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Taoiseach. I am the chair of the Joint Committee on Transport and Communications. I agree with my colleagues on the resourcing of committees. The workload for the staff is very heavy. We need extra staff within the committees. The communications unit has to be resourced as well. I support the call for that.

Our committee has done quite a bit of pre-legislative scrutiny. The only observation I have to make on that is that the outline of the contents of the Bill should be provided as part of pre-legislative scrutiny. There should not be a situation whereby we get a segment of what will be in the final legislation with a huge amount of coming through on Committee Stage. Pre-legislative scrutiny should include the heads of the Bill and it should give an idea of the content of the Bill. It should not just be a portion of the content with rest to come later. That would take away much of the confusion around pre-legislative scrutiny. It should include the heads of the Bill and what will be in the Bill. What we are finding is that we are being asked to do pre-legislative scrutiny, but we do not get large segments of the Bill until Committee Stage. That makes it difficult for us to pre-legislative scrutiny. We, as a committee, are required to sign off on something, but we do not know the full contents of the Bill and its full subject matter.

We have done extensive work around a range of areas. When the committee was established, we looked at aviation and produced a report on it. We very much advocated the use of rapid antigen testing in our report on aviation, which was produced in December 2020. It took a while for that to come into being but we welcome that it has. We ask that the national aviation policy review would get under way straight away. Cork and Shannon Airports have fallen behind Dublin. It makes no sense in terms of balanced regional development. They have gone down by 12% while Dublin has gone up to nearly 85%. That needs to be looked at and we ask for that to be expedited.

The national broadband plan falls under our remit. There has been progress on that, but we have to look at where the blockages are. The blockage at the moment is in the inter-relationship between National Broadband Ireland and some of the other providers using some of its infrastructure. That needs to be joined up. I believe that would bring things up to speed.

National cybersecurity falls under our remit. We have held extensive consultations on it. The national digital strategy was launched by the Taoiseach in February of this year. We would ask that the National Cyber Security Centre, NCSC, would be fully resourced.

We had the Irish Aviation Authority, IAA, before the committee. A number of unidentified planes were detected off the coast. Two of those did not have transformers and they could not be identified. They were both Russian planes. Would the Taoiseach support investment into primary radar services?

We produced a report on the national development plan, NDP. We welcome that the public works contract is now being reformed. We are going to work on that. An Post falls under our remit, which is quite extensive. We basically want to see sufficient supports being put in place in that regard.

That covers the range of areas we have looked at. The legislation we covered included the Merchant Shipping (Investigation of Marine Casualties) (Amendment) Act, Road Traffic and Roads Bill, the Air Navigation and Transport Bill and the communications Bills. These are the asks of the committee and I would welcome the Taoiseach’s comments on the same.