Brendan Ryan (Labour)

I agree with Members on the apparent recurring crisis at Crumlin hospital. It is rich of the Tánaiste to tell the Opposition not to play politics with the issue. Does that mean we should not mention it? It is our moral and political obligation to raise such issues and endeavour to find a solution.

I compliment the Tánaiste and the Progressive Democrats on sorting out Fianna Fáil on the overseas development aid issue. The Tánaiste made it clear there has been no change in Government policy and that it looked forward to Ireland meeting its commitments and reaching the UN target in 2007. I spend a lot of time here giving out about the Progressive Democrats but I compliment them on what I hope will be the restoration of the Government's credibility on the issue.

I wish to put a name on the record which I cannot even pronounce. Lyman Hams is a 13 year old Palestinian girl who was murdered by an officer of the Israeli defence forces last week on the evidence of other members of the same defence forces. That is a worse offence than all of what we saw and which outraged us so much about United States troops in Iraq. We saw nothing as brutal as that. It is time we began to wonder about whether we should allow a state, which apparently tolerates such activities, to be part of what we call the community of democratic states. I say that while being fully aware of the horrible things that have been done by suicide bombers. One cannot run a civilised society if incidents or activities such as that are, in any way, diluted or tolerated. That is why I wish to put that young girl's name on the record of this House.

Can we have a debate on competitiveness? When we have debates on competitiveness, it inevitably ends up being entirely about wage rates. According to the World Economic Forum, this country's competitiveness problems have very little to do with our wage rates and a lot to do with our lack of technological development, our weaknesses in infrastructure, our poor institutional arrangements and the excessively centralised nature of our economic decision making which is good code for the mess the Department of Finance keeps making of everybody else's efforts to operate efficiently. It is high time we had a debate on competitiveness. A good report has been written by the World Economic Forum which should be the basis of that debate. I do not think we are that overwhelmed with business and I ask the Leader to consider it at an early stage.