Regina Doherty (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Cathaoirleach and colleagues. I will answer the questions in reverse order and I note Senators Boylan and Cassells raised this issue earlier. It is a glaring omission that people with experience and knowledge of local news, national news, digital news and all the new forms that we have are missing from the committee. To that end, when the commission was established yesterday, I sought the Minister's time for a debate on the issue. I have secured a debate and I hope to schedule it for next week.

In response to the contributions of Senators Burke and Chambers, tomorrow afternoon we hope to have a two-hour debate on aviation at which I expect everybody to raise the concerns that I believe we all have on both inward and outward bound domestic transport and the major employment implications that Covid-19 has placed on the aviation industry.

Various debates have been sought with the Minister for Environment, Climate and Communications, Deputy Eamon Ryan, and with the Minister for Justice and Equality concerning defamation laws. I will make suggestions but the issue most raised here this morning has been the changes with the Bus Éireann Expressway routes. I will ask for a debate but I remind colleagues, and I assume everybody knows this already, that the reduction of the 18 routes to 14 yesterday is based on the point that Expressway is the part of Bus Éireann that is not supported by the public service levy because it is the private and enterprise division of Bus Éireann. There are some heartening key takeaways, including that not one bus driver will lose his or her job because of the amount of work that is available and supported by all the public-supported levied routes, which is a plus. In addition, every single route of the four routes that were restricted yesterday are serviced by other supported Bus Éireann and city journey providers. That is something from which to take solace. I will ask for a debate to be had at the earliest possible intervention.

Lots of colleagues have raised the issue of The O’Rahilly house today and they have raised it before. It is blindingly obvious in this country that sometimes, no matter what we do and the concerns that we raise, when people want to bulldoze through something, just to get the development they want, they simply bulldoze through the development. Sometimes we find ourselves completely disarmed and unable to do something, which is a real shame. I do not just mean in normal circumstances.However, in circumstances where we have lost a vital piece of heritage relating to one of the founders of what we understand and enjoy today as modern democracy is an awful shame. Senator Martin suggested that we should make them rebuild the house. That misses the value of what we have lost. We should look collectively at ensuring that something like this does not happen again by giving the relevant bodies the powers to stop something like this happening again. Closing the door after this particular horse has bolted seems rather weak.

Other colleagues highlighted specific instances regarding St. Mary's. I will certainly write on our behalf to ensure continuity of the service for the 18 residents.

Many people asked for the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs to take more refugees from the Moria camp in Lesbos. We had this kind of discussion some weeks ago. To that end, on behalf of Senators, I wrote to the Minister suggesting that the four unaccompanied children we had agreed to take was much lower than our heartfelt intentions. It is nice to hear that he agrees with us and intends to try to take many more. Senator Keogan knows this to be true. We need to accept that we are short of foster homes and cannot take unaccompanied children to this country when we have nowhere for them to go. If anything, today we should put out a call for people to become foster parents because that is the real crux.

The debate on direct provision is ongoing and I hope we will finalise it in the upcoming months and years to provide alternative accommodation. The reality is that if we take 400 people from Lesbos tomorrow, we will all be having the conversation as to the communities in which they get settled. Unfortunately, in the past year, we have experienced the ugly side of what people feel, albeit perhaps clumsily expressing themselves. That conversation needs to be had. I will again write to the Minister. It was comforting to hear his public statement last week saying that he will try to bring many more children to the country than the four we have already agreed to take.

Senator Dolan raised swimming pools. It is outrageous that at this time we would consider closing one of the very few necessary and vital outlets for people to have a bit of sociability. In the past couple of days, we have seen an outcry in the media, perhaps understandably, that some of our younger people are expressing themselves in ways that some of us older people do not appreciate and do not understand. I have four young people at home. They are struggling and finding it hard not to be able to do what they would normally expect to do. Perhaps it is my fault that I have not instilled this in them, but they do not have the same kind of critical understanding of the emergency, for want of a better word, that we are experiencing. We need to help them to appreciate the difficulties they are having and not bash them because they happen to be doing something we do not agree with or approve of.

Young people in this country are wonderful. They go to every country in the world and represent us in work, sports and the arts. However, we are very quick to demonise them for doing something that they take for granted that they should be able to do, albeit that they are doing it in different ways than they would have previously, particularly when they go back to college. Instead of demonising them we need to get the message to them that they are as vulnerable as the rest of us are. It is not just us older people or our parents who are vulnerable.

It is ridiculous to shut down one of the outlets we have because we are short of money when we are spending hundreds of millions of euro, and in some cases billions of euro, to support people through this pandemic. It is a time to be generous and it certainly is not a time to be stingy. If it is only Galway, it should be relatively easy to fix because it cannot cost that much. Senator Dolan said the company runs 700 swimming pools in the country. I suggest that we all go to our own areas to make sure that it is not a much larger issue than just Galway. We should support Senator Dolan to ensure it gets the funding it needs.

I was in the Chamber when Senator Byrne raised this issue last week. I think Google knows more about me than I do myself. It is scary to hear the Senator put it as eloquently as he did last week. It is really scary that 33% of the world's data is held on servers in this country in something that we laud as the wonderful data industry that we have. I am not sure we should laud it. I am not sure we should encourage more data centres to be built.I will request the Minister for Justice and Equality, my constituency colleague, Deputy Helen McEntee, to come into the House today or at the earliest convenience to talk to the Senator, and all of us-----