Michael McDowell (Independent)

I welcome the Taoiseach here today and to remind him that it is now 12 years since he and I stood in the studios of TV3, as it then was, defending the existence of this House, and Mary Lou McDonald and Richard Bruton, I think, were proposing its abolition. That happened then and the people of Ireland thought that this House was going to be reformed. The people of Ireland thought that but it is ten years since the Taoiseach challenged the then Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, about the failure to implement the Manning report. I am not going to spend too much time on this but I am going to say this. Six Senators would be elected by only 60,000 university graduates registered for the new university constituency if there was a snap election tomorrow. The great majority of Irish people would not be entitled to have a direct vote on the composition of this House. The people who hold degrees from the new University of Ulster or Queen's University, all of those people in Northern Ireland would have no say at all. It is about time the Taoiseach implemented the Manning report.

We as a democracy live in close proximity and, in a sense, with close connections, politically and every other way, to the United Kingdom. One thing that we cannot be complacent about is that the latest opinion polls in England suggest that Nigel Farage and his Reform UK party would sweep the boards if an election were held at any time in the near future. That may change. Nothing is inevitable in politics but that would have very serious implications for asylum seeking in Britain, especially in the context of the common travel area. It would also have very serious implications, I believe, for the attitude of loyalists in Northern Ireland to the Good Friday Agreement because of the nationalistic tones adopted by Farage and his supporters. We live in a world where there are very serious challenges coming down the road, potentially, for this country and there is no point in sweeping them under the carpet.

The figures and the plans the Taoiseach has outlined are impressive. I support nearly all of the plans the Government has for infrastructure, but the biggest crisis in Ireland is one between planning and implementation. That is our biggest crisis. We need new laws for delivering infrastructure. The day before yesterday there was a good news story about rail travel in Ireland, how there would be hourly services on the Dublin to Cork route and Thurles would be effectively as close to Dublin as Greystones, which was an impressive thing. However, when you read to the bottom of the story the kernel of truth was that €5.6 million was being set aside to plan for these things. The plans are great. We have spent a lot of money on infrastructural planning, and we have a lot of ideas, but actually getting shovels into the ground and projects completed is our biggest problem. You do not have to talk about the children's hospital. Right across the board there has been, I would say over the period of time that the Taoiseach and I have been Members of the Oireachtas, a gradual movement of executive capacity from Government Departments and Ministers to agencies which simply are not delivering. When it comes to compulsory purchase, when it comes to delivering on projects and when it comes to using public-private partnerships - by the way if they had not been implemented, we would not have our motorway system - there has to be a radical change, and that includes changing attitudes in the Department of public expenditure.

One thought that occurs to me, and there are many Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael Senators in this House, is that the differences between those two parties really are very small. The time has come for them to realise that there is change afoot in Ireland and that, if they got together and united as a political force, this country would be far better served than having them divided and mutually competing for electoral support instead of co-operating in government.