Brendan Ryan (Labour)

I fully support Senator O'Toole's request for a debate on the national spatial plan. This would be very usefully debated today. It is important to remember that many Members of this House are elected local representatives serving on county councils or city councils. They therefore have a particular reason to be concerned about issues like this.

A spatial plan is of course extremely important, but it pre-supposes an infrastructure to deal with it. It is therefore very disturbing to see reports in this morning's newspapers of warnings that we may have an electricity shortage in three or four years. The one company capable of building power stations – the ESB – will not be allowed to build them. The private sector keeps moaning that electricity is not dear enough here to enable them to make enough money to build power stations. For some daft ideological reason the people of Ireland are to be penalised because of the efficiency of the ESB. The possibility of an electricity shortage – to add to the fact that we are bottom of the league in broadband, motorways and rail transport – would make a mockery of a spatial plan. We need a serious debate in this House about how to meet the infrastructural needs that underlie both economic development and the spatial plan.

A headline in today's edition of The Irish Times attributes to farmers a great concern that benchmarking would bankrupt the economy. Farmers should look after themselves and should leave public servants alone. They have a capacity for bashing public servants that is emulated by Senator Ross—