It is good to see that Senator Norris is ecumenical in how he regards all parties. I welcome the fact that the Minister of State at the Department of Justice and Equality, Deputy David Stanton, has brought legislation through recognising Travellers as an ethnic group. I represent many Travellers and it is a positive move. I hope it will be a catalyst for real change.

Last night, there was a tragic car accident on the M7 between junction 27, Birdhill, and junction 28, Castletroy. One man tragically lost his life. Many cars were involved in the accident. There was severe weather along the stretch of road and I have e-mailed the CEO of Transport Infrastructure Ireland, TII, formerly the National Roads Authority, Mr. Michael Nolan, asking him to carry out an investigation into the circumstances of the accident. The stretch of road in question is in County Tipperary but it leads towards Gooig bog. Many of people have told me there are issues relating to the road in terms of flooding and aquaplaning. I pass my sympathies to the family of the man who lost his life on the route last night. We need to ensure that the route is safe.

The good news is that figures from the Central Statistics Office, CSO, show that there are 44,000 fewer unemployed people than this time last year, which is a major improvement. Now that we have got over the major unemployment difficulty, we need to start planning for the long term. Part of that planning should involve infrastructure development. We have not had a major debate on that matter. Senator Kieran O'Donnell has raised the Cork to Limerick road or, as he would say, the Limerick to Cork road, and the Cork city north ring road. We need to plan for infrastructure development and set out a clear plan including sourcing the funding to do this work.

The population of the country will continue to increase. There is no point in responding to it after it has increased. We need to plan for the increase. Part of it is about rail, road and the whole infrastructure, including our health care system, school system and third-level institutions. We do much of our planning in our urban areas in a piecemeal fashion. We produced a Cork area strategic plan. Although it was great to do a plan, not all of it was implemented, and it causes the bottlenecks that subsequently arise. It might be appropriate to have a debate on the issue of infrastructural development and decentralisation from Dublin.

Rather than having 200 jobs in 40 or 50 different areas, we should focus on five or six key areas. We need to debate the matter.