Regina Doherty (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The ladies are very welcome here this morning. I am really delighted to see so many young women looking at and interested in politics. Hopefully, they will give me and Senator Clifford-Lee a run for our money in the future. They are all very welcome.

I thank my colleagues for raising a wide variety of topics this morning. Senator Keogan raised the level of ESB electricity outages we have.I am not really sure about the rest of the country but we certainly get them a lot in north County Dublin. The girls will probably be able to attest to that. To be fair to the ESB, when there are planned outages it gives plenty of notice to our houses, homes and businesses. Sometimes there is contention with businesses and there is a lot of wrangling as to when the dates are. However, a lot of the outages that happen are not planned. They occur because we have degrading lines and we should have more underground lines than overhead lines and because there are cows, apparently, knocking their backsides into lines and causing outages, as well as birds and a whole variety of reasons that are causing these unplanned outages. We need to have a proper look at that and see what we can do. If the lines we have need to be upgraded, they should be upgraded. We should be looking at the quality and the delivery of services and maybe we should be having a look at the cost to businesses and trying to compensate them in some way, shape or form because they cannot plan for unplanned outages. I thank the Senator for raising that.

Senator Conway welcomed the minor sewerage schemes that have now been sanctioned for Clare. To be fair to him, he has been raising that for over a year.

Senator Boylan spoke about the awful ongoing war. The images are absolutely awful. I do not doubt that what she is saying is true but honest to goodness, all I am seeing are the awful images of the results of the Israeli attack on Palestine. I really do believe the Senator is right with regard to the manipulation of people's messages on Instagram, and all social media platforms. Those companies were before the committee yesterday and gave all kinds of statistics about how they are doing everything right and yet all we still see is very biased information and sometimes misinformation. The Senator is right that it needs to be challenged.

Both Senators Wall and Murphy raised the welcome advancements in the hot school meals programme yesterday. If I died and went to heaven tomorrow, that would be the thing I was most proud of. It was a fight to get the pilot project done but it is a credit to Heather Humphreys that she has championed and expanded this. The plan is to go to every single primary school in the country, which is welcome.

I feel Senator Wall's pain with regard to the motorways. The idea he brought up is a simple one but it could be really effective. Let us ask the Leader to write to the Minister for Transport and we will organise a debate on that.

Senator Ahearn spoke about businesses in Clonmel. He is looking for more engagement with Irish Water, which I will certainly ask for.

Senator Boyhan asked for a debate on the report and the new recommendations from the report, which we will hopefully see next week. We will organise that in the new year.

Senator Murphy also spoke about the perplexing move by the Department to reduce not only the domestic grants for solar panels but also electric cars. There are millions of homes that need to be retrofitted and have solar panels put on. Some 23,000 have been done this year and 15,000 last year and there are 1.4 million homes in the country. I do not think it makes sense but we will ask and maybe have a debate on it after Christmas.

Senator Warfield is looking for a debate on precarious employment. The miscellaneous Bill that was passed in 2018 bans zero-hour contracts. It ensures people get written contracts within five days of taking up employment. The Senator is saying that is not happening. Let us have a proper look at that and see how we can help.

Senator Craughwell is looking for AVCs for our local authority members. We can certainly look into that.

Senator Paddy Burke is looking for more statistics to be collected by the RSA so we can be better informed as to what decisions we need to make to reduce road deaths.

Senator Mark Daly spoke about the referendum proposals we will be putting to the people on 8 March. Those are the first two Bills that will be coming to the Seanad when we resume in January.