I am very disappointed that no representatives of this House have been appointed to the Committee on the Future of Healthcare. I know that many Senators in the House have direct experience that would have added greatly to the development of that strategy.

I ask the Leader whether any contact has been made about appointments to the committee deliberating on the findings of the commission on water charges. There has been some discussion about appointing four Senators to the committee. I find it very contradictory in many ways. If we had gotten representatives onto the Committee on the Future of Healthcare, they could have been really productive. Meanwhile, we are now being asked for four Senators to be appointed to what I would call a pre-determined outcome.

The majority of Deputies that will make up that committee have already indicated what the outcome will be. The Leader's colleague in government, Deputy Micheál Martin, has already stated that there will be no water charges. Sinn Féin has been pretty consistent in what it has been saying about water charges, in fairness. Therefore, why are we going through this charade of a pre-determined committee that will sit until next March when we already know the outcome, since Micheál Martin said in Friday's Irish Independent that there will be no charges? Deputy Barry Cowen has a different opinion and has softened the edges of that stance. Deputy John Lahart referred to it as well on "The Week in Politics". However, the leader of Fianna Fáil was pretty clear in his interview on Friday that there will be no charges. Are we participating in a simple charade to get us through to March? We now know that the majority of people participating in that committee are saying that the outcome will bring an end to water charges. Why are we playing along with that?

I agree with my colleague, Senator Humphreys, on Senators not being included in the Committee on the Future of Healthcare. It is disappointing that 60 Members of the Oireachtas have been excluded from the process.

It is important that we look to the long term of where we are going as a country. The latest employment figures released are extremely significant in that we now have an unemployment rate of 7.5%, down from 15.1%. The number of people working in this country is now at 2.04 million. In the 12 months up to September this year, more than 57,000 new jobs were created.

That is over 1,100 new jobs per week.

That refers back to the demand for housing, an issue raised by my colleague, Senator Noone, and how we respond in the appropriate way to accommodate those people who are now working and paying a contribution through PRSI to the cost of running this State. We must carefully consider how we do long-term planning in urban centres. For instance, Dublin is spread out and it is taking people up to two hours to get to work. We need to take the longer-term view and consider what happens in other cities where people have gone up rather than out in terms of housing build. If we build upwards we can provide more space for recreation, social activities and sports. We need to have that debate.

This country has a huge issue with building higher than two storeys. With proper planning, there is nothing wrong with building higher than two storeys because people could walk to work in five or ten minutes instead of spending two hours travelling to work. A developer in Cork who is building new office accommodation was advised that he needed to provide residential accommodation close by and was proposing 200 apartments. That has been turned down by the councillors, which is very disappointing. That is a wrong decision and it is not the way to do business in this country. We need to have a debate on that issue in the House.