Brendan Ryan (Labour)

I support fully the proposal by the Leader of the Opposition, Senator Brian Hayes. We would be well advised to deal with this matter on which I sympathise fully with him. I want to elaborate on it in terms of this country's incapacity to enforce the regulations it makes. The nursing homes have a peculiar history. Until 1998, all inspection reports were secret documents until the Freedom of Information Act was passed. No health board was ever prepared to make available to the public or to potential users of nursing homes any report it had on its files about the quality or otherwise of care. People had to essentially buy a pig in a poke and could not even see a record of what the health board knew at that stage.

People around the country have complained about the quality of such care. This morning RTE said a bundle of documents had been released to it under the freedom of information legislation. We have a problem which the legitimate and respectable part of the nursing home business has been asking the Government to regulate for 18 months. It appears that yet another brief went unread in the Department of Health and Children.

We heard of the revelation this morning that the Health and Safety Authority is of the view that the roadworks where the awful tragedy in County Meath occurred were in blatant breach of health and safety regulations. Do we enforce any regulations here?

Last week there was a revelation in one of the newspapers that our drivers are among the least likely to be stopped for speeding or drink driving in most of the European Union. There is a fundamental issue for this country in terms of how it does its business. We are forever passing regulations. I fear we are awash with illegal dumps. We do not seem to have the will to address these issues.

I would like the Minister responsible for the public service, the Minister for Finance, to come into the House to advise us what he proposes to do to ensure all the laws and regulations in place are enforced by proper resourcing and enforcement and that there will be no dilatory unwillingness to wait until people get around to doing it themselves. I would like the Minister to come to this House to discuss that with us.

While that Minister is here, we might talk not about the EU constitution but about the extraordinary issues arising from the results of the referendum in France. Some 82% of working class people in France voted "No", according to the figures I read. That is an extraordinary percentage. We must be careful in this regard. The neo-liberal consensus, mostly a consensus among people who will not be affected by the negatives of neo-liberalism, is being challenged by those at the bottom of the income group most affected by the prescriptions of a form of international trade, which is essentially undermining the living standards of the bottom 25% of the whole of western society. If we continue to adhere to a consensus which ignores a quarter of the populations of the Union's member states, we will end up with further debacles like the one we had on Sunday and the one we will have today. I say that as one who seems to have returned to the side I have always been on regarding the EU, being on the wrong side of every treaty.