Liam Twomey (Fine Gael)

I congratulate the new Ministers who are taking up their positions and especially my county colleague Deputy Seán Connick on being appointed a Minister of State. That said, the Taoiseach made a mess of the reshuffle. There has not been a senior Fianna Fáil Minister from County Wexford since the 1960s when Mr. Jim Ryan was Minister for Finance. We have always been critical of this and the same can now be said of all the surrounding counties in the south east. There is no senior Minister from counties Waterford, Wexford, Wicklow, Carlow, Kilkenny and Tipperary, which means some 500,000 members of the population are not represented by a senior Minister.