Joe O'Reilly (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

It is important to put that on the record.

Senator Conway, who is a good champion of the mid-west and University Hospital Limerick, wants the 96-bed block to be built and sanctioned by the Minister. I fully support that. I think the Senator will not object to me saying that Senator Maria Byrne and indeed Senator Gavan have been strong advocates of this too. I support Senator Conway's view that we need to move on it. There is no logic in the delays. It is part of the new brief of the Minister for Public Expenditure, National Development Plan Delivery and Reform, Deputy Donohoe, that he is watching the timescale of delivery of these projects. It is quite bizarre that a project can be approved today and then it is completed five years later. That is not on and it should not be the case. We should move on with the beds, the building, and the whole thing very quickly. I know there are processes but there is no need for bizarre Byzantine processes that go on interminably. I could cite a case in my own town. I was harassing the then Minister, Alan Shatter, for ages on this. We had sanction for the building of a Garda barracks in the town in 2015 and I think they are only now on site for the past eight months or so. It might finish sometime next year. That is quite crazy. If it was sanctioned in 2015, it should have been built by 2016 or even late 2015. I agree with Senator Conway on that.

Senator Boyhan raised a very important point. I will convey the need for a debate in the House on it to the Leader. There is an issue with the impact of labour shortages on the horticultural business. This supports the view of Senators Gavan and Sherlock, which I share, that we need to increase the minimum wage and keep it increasing each year. There is a problem here. The Senator is right. I can never understand this. I may be missing something in the rationale for this, but why does it take so long to get our new Irish who want to work in the system - asylum seekers or people who come in from Ukraine and are stuck in hotels - into the workforce in places like the horticultural sector? It is quite crazy. It is bizarre and it should change. There is no point in engaging in some sort of ridiculous politics about this. If Senator Boyhan is right, he is right. The truth is that we need to deal with this or otherwise we will have a crisis here. Like Senators Gallagher and Wilson, I come from mushroom land. We have a lot of mushroom processing in our region. I do not refer to the wild mushrooms but to the properly produced ones. My colleague Senator Seery Kearney thought I was talking about the other ones.