Senator Ross made a request yesterday for a debate on the partnership agreement. In characteristic fashion, he blamed all the problems Ireland is experiencing on the public sector unions. The part of the public sector – the third level education sector – in which I work not only embraced technological change but demanded it. Members of the NUJ were still insisting on using typewriters, when my colleagues and members of my union were demanding access to modern information technology and when everybody else had consigned typewriters to history. The idea that a member of the private sector NUJ would give lectures to the public sector in Ireland about change and modernisation is flying in the face of reality. The Internet was invented in the public sector, it was developed in the public sector and it became a tool of the public sector when the troglodytes of the NUJ still thought that typewriters were the way to type up copy.