Brendan Ryan (Labour)

I support Senator Brian Hayes's view. I find it astonishing that we have not had a serious effort in this country to address questions of the quality of management of semi-State bodies that do not seem to be able to do their job. There seems to be a particular rush to judgment always that it must be the workers of a company who are not doing their job. In fact, there are serious questions about management.

There is another dispute going on which has major implications; I refer to Irish Ferries. I would like to know the weekly wages of the agency workers to be brought in to replace Irish workers on the ferry to France. In all of the talk about international competitiveness, global markets, etc., the simple question is how much will they be paid? If people in Ireland knew what these agency workers were to be paid for an ordinary 40 hour week, I suspect they would have a much clearer view of which side they were on in this dispute as well because I believe we are getting very close to getting very cheap labour in to do these jobs. I have no problem with genuine international competitiveness but there are ways of getting around the European labour law involved here that are far more significant than simply a dispute between a shipping line and a trade union.

Like everybody else, I still harbour a hope that something dramatic might happen today. I would say this to people who seem to believe that humiliation is what is being asked of them — all of us can get very sensitive. Things were done in the name of the people of Ireland that humiliated us all on many occasions and people who claimed to represent us humiliated us. To quote Ian Paisley for the first time in my political career, we bit our lips and restrained ourselves in recent years because we thought there was a greater prize. Let us remember this, that what has been achieved now is an unequivocal position where if the IRA would only once and for all and forever go away, there is a guarantee that whoever wins elections in Northern Ireland, there will be power-sharing institutions.

The message is clear regarding the one illegal obstacle. People are entitled to their political views. Nobody in this country is entitled to have a private army. There is a fundamental difference. I just wish people would at this stage accept that if they would only go away and stop, we all would forget all that was done. At the end of it all, that is not a humiliation. It is a recognition of reality.