On 15 June this year at a meeting of the Joint Committee on Tourism, Culture, Arts, Sports and Media, the Irish Hotels Federation, IHF, attempted the magic trick of on one hand arguing for the extension of the 9% VAT rate and on the other hand defending escalating costs in the hotel sector for bedroom prices, a trick that Paul Daniels himself would have been proud of. However, in sawing that body in half the IHF was unable to fuse it back together. It left the legs dangling away from the torso when it was finished.…

Is that 17% or 70%?

The issue of policing is one that all of us grapple with regularly. The announcement in the budget that 1,000 additional gardaí will be allocated and provided for is very welcome. However, the issue of allocation and where those gardaí eventually find themselves in our local towns and villages is one I think we all have concerns about. When we raise that in here, if we have a debate in this Chamber and the Minister for Justice addresses us, she will, of course, defer to the line that policing matters and where gard…

I thank the Senator. I concur with what she said about last Friday. It was a really worthwhile engagement.

I now turn to Senator Flynn who, I believe, has a new Taoiseach's nominee beside her joining us in the Seanad this morning.

I call Senator Carrigy and I welcome Ciara from his office, who is from Luxembourg and who is a student in Trinity College Dublin.

I welcome Eddie O'Reilly from Longford, who has served the nation with distinction in the Defence Forces. This is his first time to visit the Houses of the Oireachtas. He joins us with Deputy Flaherty. I call on Senator Mullen and I apologise for skipping over him earlier.

In respect of the discourse between the Deputy Leader and Senator Mullen, we are all aware that the judgments of the courts are not being criticised here.

It is important to put that on the record.

We had budget speeches in the Seanad yesterday evening to dissect and welcome the packages worth €90 billion throughout all Departments. A very small aspect of the budget mentioned yesterday, on which I had certainly campaigned for a number of years in association with Local Ireland and NewsBrands, was the elimination of VAT on newspapers. It has gone from 9% to zero and this will give the industry a fighting chance to survive. What will help the industry to survive is people buying newspapers. Yesterday when the M…

I thank the Leas-Chathaoirleach. It is great to have the Minister of State, Deputy Fleming, in the Chamber on this very significant day when we see expenditure on this country's budget exceed €90 billion. As I sat in the Dáil today and listened to both Ministers, Deputies Donohoe and Michael McGrath, I thought about the bravado of the Chancellor of the Exchequer in England last week. He rocked up in the House of Commons like Arnold Schwarzenegger, with both barrels loaded in typical Tory style. The only problem was…

I will watch the clock. Just as governments are supposed to do, the responsible people in the room got up and did that today. When you look at this budget in the round in terms of what it has achieved, you will see that it has achieved the key principles of helping people with real financial assistance, putting money in people's pockets to give them certainty to plan for the next year and addressing in the round the very structures that make society function in regard to education, policing and housing. That is a r…

I apologise for interrupting. The closure was announced today of the Fingal Independent -----

Yesterday, the HSE's emergency department task force revealed some frightening statistics, when it reported that this year alone there have been some 40,000 breaches of over a 24-hour wait time to be seen in our emergency departments. The very same HSE that is failing so miserably in this regard, and the very same agency, at the same time, has been compiling a report to close an emergency department in Navan. Acute emergency departments around the country cannot deal with the patients that they have, with over 40,0…

I thank the Minister and all of the staff in the Department for taking on board our concerns. We spoke specifically about the sections pertaining to the interests of children. This was motivated by the discussions with the special rapporteur on child protection when he came before the committee and with students who came from various primary and secondary schools to debate these points with us. I thank the Minister for taking these points on board. I note what she has said about the right to privacy already being a…

I second the amendment.

I second the amendment.

I second the amendment.

I welcome the acceptance by the Government of the references in respect of sporting bodies, as Senator Carrigy has pointed out. As the Minister has said, there is a need for media literacy, not just among educational bodies and society more broadly, and sporting bodies especially. Two weeks ago, we launched our Oireachtas committee report on bullying within sporting organisations. A specific piece of work also was done on online bullying. Representatives from all the major pillar sports were at the launch in Leinst…

I thank the Minister for taking on board a significant part of the debate last night. Senator Malcolm Byrne and I sought the insertion of a reference to the regulation of gambling in the Bill. I accept what the Minister said, which is that the lead Department with responsibility for this is naturally the Department of Justice, which foresees the creation and implementation of that Bill in respect of gambling late this year. Notwithstanding that, the point that we made is that the sphere in which gambling is now mos…