Brendan Ryan (Labour)

The one thing of which I am sure is that the chairman of the Revenue Commissioners will not be meeting any first time house buyers to discuss their tax positions with them, thereby defining the nature of Irish society fairly well. I agree with the issue just raised by Senator O'Toole. Too many people have been conning Irish agriculture for far too long. The CAP, as Irish farmers came to understand it, was never going to last indefinitely. A great part of the effort made in doing a wonderful imitation of King Canute would have been better spent on trying to build up a way of life for rural Ireland to enable a viable lifestyle to continue. It is a great pity.

However, simply changing the conditions in which sugar can be sold in the European Union will not do much for poor workers on sugar producing estates in the developing world. Unless we tie that development to proper working conditions we will simply make richer the already filthy rich sugar barons of Brazil and similar countries. It is a wonderful opportunity for the EU to use its leverage to ensure that there is a just regime in those developing countries to match the justice of the trading conditions.

I do not have any great faith that the present EU Commissioner for Trade, the doctrinaire free marketeer from the British Labour Party, Mr. Peter Mandelson, will be prepared to make those conditions. I would like the Government to demand justice at international level, for farmers at home and for sugar estate workers in developing countries. On those conditions, the Government should be prepared to take its share of the sacrifice but, without such a deal, we will simply transfer more riches to already disgustingly rich people in countries that are profoundly unequal.

Will the Leader ascertain — she is good at this when nobody else is — the position on the debt of Aer Rianta? Will it be a debt on Dublin, Shannon or Cork airports? These debts have huge implications for these airports. We were given categorical assurances which now appear to be far from categorical.

I am horrified at the way officials from the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform have yet again used public concern to slip clauses into the Garda Síochána Bill that fulfil their wildest dreams. They can now demand every single document in the possession of the Garda without any justification to any external body. This is just one of the 116 amendments introduced by the Minister to the Lower House yesterday. Someone suggested that fax machines were overheating due to the amount of printing of late amendments from a Department which, as was said on yesterday's Order of Business, is a model of obscurity, secrecy and of all that is wrong with the worst kind of public service. We will have a very difficult session next week if we have to deal with such a mass of amendments within four days. I put the House on notice that the Labour Party will not be prepared to accept the kind of rush job imposed on the Dáil against the wishes of the majority of its Members.