Brendan Ryan (Labour)

As a long-time colleague of Dr. Manning, I fully share Senator O'Toole's opinion with regard to the appointment. I am at a loss to understand how anybody could have treated SSIAs in the manner described by Senator Brian Hayes. It is as if somebody, perhaps in a more financially focused area than the Department of Education and Science, has decided that SSIAs were a big mistake and wanted to recoup the money. While the Minister for Education and Science seems too sensible to make a decision such as this, I suspect somebody beyond her decided differently. As the House will be aware, I see the malign influence of the Department of Finance in many areas of life, so I would not be surprised to see its hand in this matter.

Yesterday, reference was made to the continuing uncertainty on the future of Cork and Shannon airports and the Government's apparent determination to break the promise it made that the two airports would begin their operations without debt. The Government appears unable to make a decision on the matter, with the consequence that the airports are also unable to make decisions on their future. If Cork Airport is landed with a debt of €160 million, the repayments will cost €10 per passenger for the next five or six years. That will have a profound effect on business passing through Cork Airport. Shannon Airport will have similar problems.

We now know that the Dublin Airport Authority is trying to manage the future of Shannon Airport from a distance of 120 miles and I presume it will attempt to do the same in respect of Cork. Cork and Shannon airports are in a worse situation now than they were when Aer Rianta offered some sort of formal structure. It is high time that the Government kept its promise by resolving the issue so that Cork and Shannon airports can develop as planned.

Today's newspapers published a report by Johns Hopkins University on the death toll in Iraq. It is a highly reputed university and I do not believe anybody should argue about the methodology. The work this university has done is unchallengeable. It reckons that 650,000 more people have died in Iraq since the invasion than would otherwise have been the case. This is a huge figure and is twice to three times as many people killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. What is astonishing is not the figure but that it is being tucked away in the inside pages of our newspapers. Nobody wants to face this fact.

This information is effectively unchallengeable but it is being challenged by the usual spokesmen in the usual places in the White House. We are talking about 650,000 Iraqis who have died because of this exercise in liberation. It is time we said those 650,000 people were murdered by George Bush and Tony Blair. Let me not hear another word from the US Government about terrorism. The prime terrorists in the world are in the White House in the United States. The evidence is that 650,000 people have died in five years.

Linked to that I call for the beginning of a debate on war and armaments. We now have a €15 billion national pensions fund. The least we can do is ensure it is not invested in the armaments industry but we cannot get that categorical assurance from the fund. There ought to be a fundamental ethical principle that our future pensions should not be dependent on armaments or, incidentally, on tobacco. We would be correctly horrified if it were involved in the drugs industry. However, the fund is categorically refusing to exclude the armaments industry from its portfolio. The armaments industry will kill more innocent people in a year than the drugs industry. It is a fundamental issue and it is related to the scale of what happened in Iraq because we are tainted by that type of nonsense if we invest money in such industries.