Mr. Willie Noone:

As the Senator has rightly said, it was voluntary. However, if she says that it was voluntary to the workers who were let go when the briquette factory in Littleton closed and there were no jobs within a 50-mile radius, to the people in the coal depots who are losing their jobs as we speak and there are no jobs in their vicinity, or to a 62 year old worker whose bog is closing down and the nearest job is 30 miles away, they will give her an answer. She is right when she says that people in rural areas, like the area I come from, are suffering. She can try to cod people who are in their 60s by telling them that they do not have to take something on the basis that it is purely voluntary-----