Brendan Ryan (Labour)

I hope the Leader can assure us that the Criminal Law (Insanity) Bill 2002 will not be taken before the summer, so that it is not sprung on the House. I share fully Senator Brian Hayes's view that whatever the urgencies of Government positions, the Intoxicating Liquor Bill 2003 makes reference to 14 other pieces of legislation. The Minister has made it clear that the whole area of regulation of intoxicating liquor sales is desperately in need of codification. To his credit he has said he will do so. It makes it difficult for spokespersons for the Opposition in particular. There are probably some people in Fianna Fáil who can remember when they were in Opposition and therefore realise the difficulties. The Opposition does not have the resources of the Civil Service to do all this work. To take Committee Stage so soon is not the way we should do our business. In this I do not blame the Leader because I have evidence of her willingness to stand up for this House on this matter. I want to emphasise that this is not the way this House should do its business.

I want to raise only one real issue on the Order of Business because it is hugely important. Last night I was looking at RTE's website and I saw a little headline in the corner of the business section which indicated the Railway Procurement Agency had now discovered that the Dublin metro could be constructed for €2.6 billion. This morning that had gone up to €3.4 billion, but it was originally €4.8 billion. The report indicated the construction time could be 2.5 years instead of seven. It said agency officials came to these conclusions because they had been in touch with Professor Manuel Maynar Melis, the director general of transport infrastructure in Madrid, who had supervised the construction of the Madrid metro.

If a State agency is capable of that level of erroneous estimations, it should be sacked. I wish to be explicit: if a student of mine did a crude assessment of the capital cost of a chemical plant and forgot to compare it with what was happening in the real world, he or she would fail. What happened here is that some genius decided to do an estimate, obviously without reference to what was happening in the rest of the world. As far as I am concerned, that is incompetence on a scale to which there is only one response. They should be sacked and replaced by somebody who can do the job properly.