David Norris (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I join my colleague Senator O'Brien in expressing concern about the situation regarding the Dublin Fire Brigade ambulance service. I have had occasion to use the service myself and found it extremely efficient and professional. That cannot be said of ambulance services throughout the country. I do not think that we should diminish our ambulance service in any way but should bring the rest of the service around the country up to the standards of the Dublin Fire Brigade service, which has been in existence for over 100 years. It has served the people of this city extraordinarily well and I have signed the aforementioned petition.

Regarding the royal visit, I am delighted that it continues to be a tremendous success. We are lucky to have somebody of the intellectual distinction of Michael D. Higgins as our President representing us in Britain. It is a gruelling programme, involving the President addressing both Houses of Parliament, which he did with great distinction, and speaking to the world's leading scientific organisation, the Royal Society.

We must also remember the extraordinary role played by the royal family. One of the things that is necessary is to imagine the situation of the other side. It is extraordinarily generous of the royal family to indicate that they will be here for the celebrations, if one can call them that, of 1916. I take a different view from almost everyone else in this House on this. I have never said, despite libellous comments in one of Mr. Murdoch's newspapers, that the leaders of 1916 were terrorists. They certainly were not - they were idealists. They clearly demonstrated that they were not terrorists by cancelling the rising when civilian casualties rose. Had they been terrorists, they would have been delighted at that and would have used it for political purposes. I believe they were misguided. The rising had the tragic impact of subverting the direction in which we were going. We would have got every single thing that was gotten under Redmond at the end of the war. I think, because they wanted to put themselves into the history books, that there was an element of vaingloriousness about the actions of those in 1916.

If that had not happened, what would have been endorsed would not have been the violent tradition, which is very much a minority. It would have been the glorious tradition that goes back to Grattan's Parliament, through O'Connell, Parnell and Redmond. That would have been very important and I see no additional gains.

If viewed from the other side, this was in the middle of a war for life and death. It was seen by many people, including a majority of people on this island, as a stab in the back and treachery. It was horribly badly handled by the English, but that is the tragic fact. We need to start to understand the other person's point of view.

Unfortunately I will not be able to take part on today's resumed debate on the Irish language because I took part on the previous day. The reason the debate has been extended is that so many people wanted to speak and every one of us made an attempt to speak in Irish, which is quite unlike what happened in the other House, the bullying House that tried to bully us into extinction, where the debate collapsed because with all its nationalism, it did not have enough Irish speakers in the place.

Can something be done about the former semi-State companies that offer so-called bundles of this, that and the other? We suffered from the toxic bundles, which brought the economic collapse. We now have other trickery by organisations such as Eircom, whose employees are cold calling people every evening between 7 o'clock and 9 o'clock. I try to husband my resources because I am not terribly well. I have to get out of bed two or three times every night because some little squirt is ringing me to try to sell me these bundles. Unsolicited cold calling and bundles should be banned. They are anti-social and they are a disgrace.