David Norris (Independent)

I agree with my colleagues, including Senator Hanafin, that we should have a discussion with the Minister for Transport. I am very concerned about the situation in Aer Lingus. The management there is obviously under pressure from Ryanair and one can understand its difficulties but it is trying to extract a written undertaking from workers that they will not strike. Is this September 1913 or November 2007? There is a clear echo of William Martin Murphy about this and it is completely wrong.

We should have integrated ticketing. It is not a terribly complicated exercise. Senator Hanafin's party in Government promised it seven years ago, so I do not know what the problem is. Perhaps the problem is the Railway Procurement Agency. I was in Belfast the other day and travelled on the Enterprise. I asked if it was one of the Spanish trains and was told it was. They are the trains on which we spent €85 million but we got the calibre of the bogies wrong. They do not fit so if the train travels over 25 mph, one's coffee lands on one's lap and yet we went ahead and bought them. This is the kind of problem with which we are dealing.

Competition does not always work in the interests of the consumer. It is about time we realised that and became a bit more sophisticated and looked at what competition in certain circumstances does, especially in the area of supermarkets, etc.

Will the Leader give me the information he promised me on whether we are going to act sensibly, to use his words, and introduce Second Stage of the Defamation Bill so that Members can have the opportunity to speak on it? This is very important because a series of newspapers are behaving in exactly the same way they did before the Defamation Bill was dropped. They are obviously fairly cocky about the situation. Will the Leader confirm that the Privacy Bill has been effectively dropped and that the Government is not going ahead with it?

I agree with Senator Donohoe that one needs to be careful about what one says because irony is occasionally lost. Yesterday I referred to the explosion of managerial staff in hospitals and I do not retract a single word. I threw in a reference to Chairman Mao and my esteemed and valued colleague, Senator O'Toole, made an ironic aside about Pol Pot. Today I discovered that I am calling for Pol Pot's policies to be implemented in Ireland. Not really — that was irony, darlings.