Diarmuid Wilson (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

That is only a flippant comment. I am sure the Senator is very attractive to some women.

What I wanted to address in the realm of social media is the volume of intimidation that happens on a daily basis. We do not have laws to do anything about this. On a number of occasions I have raised in what happened to a man named Eamonn Jackson from my area. That continues to happen because we do not have laws in place to prevent that from happening to him. I do not intend revisiting the case but I will come back to it if something does not happen regarding what is being carried out by so-called concerned animal welfare people and what they are doing to that man and to his family, and what they are costing him economically and health wise.

I call on the Leader to arrange at an early date a debate on the infrastructural deficit that is a reality for people who live north of a line between Sligo and Dublin. I instanced here previously the fact that if one looks at a railway map from the 1920s, the entire 32 counties of this island were covered by the rail network, and nobody was further than 20 minutes from a station. That was at a time people had to rely on bicycles, donkeys and carts or horses and traps to get to those stations. It is troubling that looking at a map of the rail network nowadays, it is clear the area above the line I referred to has been abandoned by the State through the decades. It is more troubling that if one looks at the motorway infrastructure in place, there is almost an exactly parallel deficit. It is time this was addressed urgently.

The carbon tax was introduced for good reasons. However, all it has achieved for the people from the part of the country I come from is they have to pay an extra 4 cents for their diesel, while making the same journey and emitting the same volume of carbon as they did the day before this carbon tax was introduced. This morning, for example, it took me 58 minutes to get from Blanchardstown to Leinster House. If we were real about trying to tackle carbon emissions and the global warming resulting from cars, we should at least have a park-and-ride system in operation so one can get from Blanchardstown to the city centre, either with a light rail network or a bus network. One would get from Blanchardstown to here in ten minutes if the proper infrastructure was in place. It is time we got real with the deficit in infrastructure in this country, particularly in the area I referred to previously.