Charlie O'Connor (Dublin South West, Fianna Fail)

I apologise, I am not as experienced as the rest of the Deputies and I have a little to learn from the more astute. I do not know if Deputy O'Donnell was here when I made this point so I will repeat that politics is not just for the good times. One must learn to deal with the bad times.

I have said it more than once in this contribution that I bring my life experiences to politics. This includes living through difficult times. I lived through the late 1940s, the 1950s, the 1960s, the 1970s, the 1980s and so on. I had to look for a job, I had to emigrate and I might be living in London today were it not for the fact that I got homesick. Deputy O'Donnell would not have the opportunity to have a go at me if I was across in London doing something completely different. I came home, got a job in difficult times and each time I lost my job through no fault of my own, which might happen again, I kept my head down and focused on what I was doing and what I wanted to achieve.

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