Brendan Ryan (Labour)

I ask the Leader if she has made any progress on the issue of aircraft allowed to land in the country that do not produce manifests of cargo and crew. Under what circumstances are these aircraft permitted?

I agree with Senator O'Toole. I read this week about a group of Polish workers who complained six months ago that they were being underpaid by their employer, yet the labour inspectorate in the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment has not yet begun investigating the complaint. This is because the inspectorate does not have sufficient staff. If that case takes more than six months to investigate, how long will it take to draft legislation and how can we believe that it will be enforced? The first thing that is required is a significant and multilingual expansion in the labour inspectorate.

A controversy arose this week on the issue of who defines ethos in our hospitals. When equality legislation was passing through the Houses, many endeavoured to produce a definition of ethos so that people would know what the term meant. It appears to me, on the basis of two separate experiences, that ethos means what people want it to mean. If, on one hand, one ventures into the area of human sexuality, one receives a metaphorical strike from a crozier delivered by people who have the most plausible reasons. If, on the other hand, one tries to set up a hostel for homeless alcoholics, as I experienced in Cork recently, one can collide with Catholic schools, whose official ethos is to champion the cause of the homeless — the marginalised, according to religious orders. These schools led and sustained a campaign against the provision of the hostel in the vicinity of the school. One can conclude that with regard to official Roman Catholicism, sex is important and the poor do not count.