Susan O'Keeffe (Labour) | Oireachtas source

Before we proceed, I want to pay tribute to Senator Jimmy Harte, as I have not been in the House since he announced his retirement. I want to give him my personal best wishes and thank him for his work as a Senator and as a councillor and for what he has done in his local area in Donegal, and I wish him the very best in the future.

I join others in welcoming the Building on Recovery programme. There has been much talk in the last couple of days about potential elections and dates for elections and the fact that this is all just an election package. It always amuses me that if we had not produced a programme to examine our infrastructure in this country across the areas of tourism, transport and health, the Opposition would rightly say that the Government was not in a position to spend any money and did not have a capital plan or know where it was going. It seems to me that, as ever with the Opposition, the Government cannot win. It is good to see a proper plan being put in place over five years and, locally, to finally see the money coming for the N4 road that leads to Sligo. As many people know locally and nationally, many people have had fatal accidents on the current road. Finally the money will be made available in this plan to sort out that road. In neighbouring Leitrim, there is a terrific proposal for the Blueway programme, which is a little like the Greenway programme, but it includes the waterways and rivers as a tourism amenity for the county. It will give Leitrim a much-needed boost, with a sum of nearly a quarter of a million euro to develop that very worthy project, which people have been working on for many years without knowing whether they would receive the funding. They have pulled off a very good plan. Right around the country, this plan has good, solid elements to it. It will be based over five years and it has been costed. Some places have had money spent and one can always say that it is because there is a Minister or a TD there, but that is the nature of public representation. The most important thing is that it builds on the recovery that we have seen and it will continue to build on that recovery, so it should be welcomed by everybody without the level of cynicism that we have seen.

I am a member of the Committee on Public Service Oversight and Petitions, before which the Ombudsman laid his annual report yesterday. I welcome the work that he and his office continue to do. They are always on time with their reports and have been working very hard to try to bring certain matters into their own jurisdictions, including nursing homes, which they have succeeded in doing. They are hoping to open negotiations to try to include people in direct provision, who would then be given access to the Ombudsman. One of the matters raised by the Ombudsman, which has been raised for a number of years, is the fact that their IT system remains under pressure and that it dates back to the 1990s, which for some of us does not seem that long ago, but in terms of IT systems it is an incredibly long time ago. They are putting together a plan to seek funding for a new system. If we believe in accountability and transparency and the power and value of an ombudsman, this is funding that should be granted to the Ombudsman's office in the very near future.