Mary O'Rourke (Fianna Fail)

I am telling the Senator how it came about. There will be a debate on the Estimates tomorrow.

There is a very important Bill before the House and I wanted time to concentrate on it. We gave it plenty of time last week, although some two and a half hours of debate time was not used. I prefer to be straightforward about this issue. We scheduled a great length of time for the Bill and further time is scheduled for it tomorrow. The Tánaiste is due to bring the Bill to the Dáil on Thursday and Friday, after which it will proceed to Committee Stage. The Bill will be an Act before the end of this year.

Senator Tuffy also talked about Seanad reform and I hope she will be as enthusiastic when we get the report in January. I imagine the Senator will be enthusiastic because she is a very assiduous Member of the House. I look forward to her being a very strong supporter of Seanad reform. We will see how it all works out, but for today we are very pleased to be here and to prove that benchmarking works.

Senator Mooney mentioned RTE's 40th centenary programme on the death of President Kennedy. I imagine we all kept switching across the various television stations. Different stations had different films on the subject and John Bowman presented a very good radio programme about it on Saturday morning. If RTE was to combine all its archive television footage on President Kennedy, it would make a good programme.

The events in Istanbul brought terrible grief. I will ask the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Deputy Cowen, to attend the House. I am sure he would like to do so before the year end to talk about the international situation.