Dessie Ellis (Dublin North West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The Minister of State says it provides increased services but we have seen in the past with other services that this can lead to privatisation and the big worry is that we are going down that road, which poses a threat to the staff and their jobs. People who are impaired or who have disabilities will not have the same access to staff members. They may need help and so on. Why not extend this as a normal process of opening the libraries up more for people and provide the staff to do that? I do not know why we are going to have a personal identification number, PIN, and other mechanisms to get into a library. A library is a place where there should be a member of staff to help people. What will happen if someone comes in and causes problems with anti-social behaviour? We expect a library to be silent. It would make more sense to have staff on hand.

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