Eoghan Harris (Independent)

I listened with great interest to the long debate earlier which highlighted a number of issues and I want to touch on a few of those as they came up.

First, the notion of good news and bad news is very relative. Obviously, the newspapers' account of increases in the salaries for bank staff or senior executives is very good news for Mr. Boucher. He gets his good news and other people get bad news from the papers.

In regard to the ash from the volcano, I am glad in many ways this has happened because it forces the media and the rest of us to face the fact that not everything in this life can be regulated, made perfect or controlled. Something that has always baffled me about the media is the notion that if somebody commits suicide by running a car into the sea, Wexford, Wicklow or Waterford County Council can be held to blame because they had an insufficient number of bollards or chains in place, as if somebody would not do it some other way. There is nobody to blame for what is happening now. People are scraping the bottom of the barrel looking for people to blame.

I do not know when this eruption will end. It might not end for months. We will soon be faced with the same questions we are faced with in all walks of life when we go out to drive a car, namely, what level of death are we prepared to face to live our ordinary lives. We do it every morning if we drive a car because there is a certain death rate on the roads. At what stage do we say that we will have to take risks and fly in planes? We are an island nation. We have got to trade. We are a species. We have got to survive. Our whole life is a constant risk. We will have to look at this practically in regard to staying alive as a community. We will have to accept a margin of risk on this, and we should face up to that fact.

Second, regarding the Press Council, it was mentioned that the chairman was a creature of the media. Anyone who knows John Horgan knows that he is a creature of nothing except the habit of speaking his own mind and always doing his own thing.