Pat O'Neill (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The comments by Senator White amount to typical scaremongering. The free travel scheme, which is a great benefit to the people of this country, will be retained but the Government must take steps to cut out fraud and that is why people have received letters in respect of identification.

I wish to raise two matters on the Order of Business, one of which has been raised already. I raised this matter last April. I asked that swimming lessons be put on the curriculum at schools. A total of 40,000 students every year receive certificates under schemes run by Irish Water Safety - one of the best organisations in the country - which oversees voluntary water safety at different venues. This means 450,000 children are not benefiting. I ask that the schools, headmasters, principals and so on take up the primary aquatics water safety scheme, a free scheme set up by Irish Water Safety. Children can proceed from PAWS level 1 to up to level 8, which is swimming. This is very important because we have seen incidents recently. I sympathise with the families affected where we have had tragedies in the past two weeks because we have had very good weather. We need greater awareness. I heard on the radio this morning that more than 500 people were rescued last year by our lifeguards, an amazing statistic. If we did not have the people who are well trained by Irish Water Safety and other water safety bodies we would have had far more tragedies.

I call on the Deputy Leader to ask the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine to come to the House to discuss what is at present a crisis in the beef industry. Another major problem is the grid pricing system and it is failing and robbing farmers. Farmers have a better chance of picking the lottery numbers than of knowing the price they will get for their animals when they are sent to the factory.