Pat Rabbitte (Dublin South West, Labour)

We will leave the hyena laughs out of it for the moment. I will return to the issues about which the backbenchers are concerned. It is clear that they are the same issues I have been raising in this House, which, according to their spokesman, they bring to parliamentary party meetings and, to quote him: "they never get any further". Now the Taoiseach is trying to tell us he welcomes this revolt on the backbenches and that he will talk to them about what kind of committee they will put in place.

Meanwhile, as Mr. Haughey said, this is the worst Government in the history of the State. He said it cannot do anything right. To bear out Mr. Haughey, today we read that, for example, the Government cannot even pay the refunds to people wrongly charged in nursing homes. It turns out that it was thought the job could be outsourced to India. Everybody knows that data protection laws apply.

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