David Norris (Independent)

In that one minute, I will ride my hobby horse. The telephone companies should be regulated as well. They have got away with murder. While I know this is not directly relevant, it is disgraceful for a Fianna Fáil-led Government to accept that Irish citizens should still pay line rental to an Australian investment company for a line laid by the Irish taxpayer. One cannot get through to a person on a telephone; it is all robots. One is then told one's conversation is being tape-recorded for educational purposes. I used to get paid for educating people in the College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity of Queen Elizabeth near Dublin and I see no reason people should have an unlicensed right to tape-record my telephone conversations.

My final point may not be relevant but it is quite surprising how the most irrelevant things one says in this House travel in the right direction and have some effect so, therefore, I am not really repentant about it. I refer to the banks and the way they treat their customers in regard to telephones. We are all forced to withdraw our money from ATMs on the street but there are huge queues at them. The reason for these is that all our migrant workers and foreign guests, who are very polite, queue up to top up telephone credit. The banks are so mean that it is not enough that they swindle and scam every customer they have, they then force people out on to the street in the wind, rain and sleet to get their money out of ATMs. People must queue because the banks get another few percentage points from the telephone top-up facility. Let us look at the entire telephone industry while we are at it.