Brendan Ryan (Labour)

Nobody wants to talk about traffic yet again but it is an issue. I use the wonderfully useful Fermoy bypass so often that I purchased the capacity to pass through by electronic means without any delay. I now know that if I was to take my car around the country to the various toll systems, I would need three other devices stuck on my windscreen. I can imagine a truck driver travelling the country who needs one sticker on his windscreen for Fermoy, another for the M50, another for the M1 and another for the M4. It is the simplest thing in the world and we do not appear to be able even to do that right. We now have four different electronic systems. It is ridiculous. People travelling on the roads have enough problems without this.

I refer to another issue related to our incapacity to do anything properly. Why are our telephone bills among the world's highest? It is because our capacity to regulate is so inept. If the regulators do not have enough power, where is the amending legislation? They have the powers and will not use them. There is the ridiculous situation where the energy regulator apparently forced the ESB to have a bigger price increase than it requested. This should be sorted out once and for all. The job of the regulator is to protect the consumer, not the service provider. I am really tired of energy regulators and telecommunications regulators who seem to regard their first duty as being to look after the technological and other concerns of the service provider. This is worse than a State monopoly because it is a de facto private monopoly. I have asked the Leader on previous occasions for a debate on how we do regulation in this country and I now ask her yet again.

I am disappointed, as many other Members may be, with the extraordinarily provincial reporting by The Irish Times on a very good debate on defamation in this House yesterday. Apart from the sacred Senator from Trinity College behind me, no Member of the Opposition was reported in The Irish Times. There was not a single comment from a single Member of the Opposition. I find this astonishing and disappointing.

Contrary to a report in the Sunday Independent of last Sunday, there is an engineer in the Oireachtas and he is standing up here.