Like everyone else, when I woke up this morning I heard on "Morning Ireland" about the families who so sadly lost their lives in the fire in Clondalkin. I express my deep sympathy and that of my party to those families and their extended relatives. It brings us back to Senator Devine's Commencement debate yesterday on the fire services and the need to ensure that a fire service is on-call in Dublin to save lives. I ask everybody to go back into talks to avoid a strike in Dublin. That is very important.

Absolutely.

Hear, hear.

It is International Women's Day and there are many "why" questions. Why is there still such a large pay gap between men and women for carrying out the same work? The last real progress made was when Proinsias de Rossa introduced legislation on equal pay for equal work. At that time, it was resisted by many in society. Why did the Labour Party have to have its policy of gender quotas to ensure that women had an opportunity to run in elections? That legislation was brought in during the last Government when we were in coalition with Fine Gael and it has worked to a degree. We have seen many more women elected with very high quality and standards. They should have been elected without gender quotas. Why did we need to introduce that legislation in Ireland? Why did my party have to fight for two decades for the X case legislation? We got that legislation through with great difficulty during the last term in government. Why did we have such a regressive amendment to the Constitution in 1983? We are still fighting to repeal the eighth amendment, which was an amendment put down that did not trust women. I am probably one of the few people in the House who fought and canvassed in that referendum campaign against the amendment.

So did I.

I apologise to Senator Norris. I did not think he was old enough. There are many "Whys" in relation to inequality and discrimination against women in the State and we must keep battling to change that. The next major battle is to convince people about why the eighth amendment is so wrong. I look forward to joining, hopefully, many colleagues in the House, to try to win a referendum on the eighth amendment. For that, we must appeal to everybody. We must be careful of our language in talking about repealing the eighth and be respectful to all sides. I hope the referendum can be fought in the same spirit as the marriage equality referendum and that we can discuss facts, women's health and the need for people to be treated equally.

At the outset, I wish our women colleagues here and women all around the country a happy, productive and satisfactory International Women's Day. Following Senator Humphreys, I am very proud to have been a Member of the Oireachtas and part of the last Administration which brought in gender quotas. It was very significant legislation and very important for women. It was important to help them to break through that glass ceiling.

The events of recent days and all the unfolding information in our media highlights the neglect of children in the past. We are all horrified by that and cannot escape addressing it, remembering it, talking about it and acting to remediate it where we can. On account of that, it also behoves us to ensure that we treasure, value and celebrate the children of today in an appropriate fashion. We must compensate for and not repeat the ills of the past. That is a great onus on all of us. In that context, I address to the Leader the question of teenage discos for very young teenagers. The Leader might ask why, but I was approached recently by a parent who spent a night by a child's bed not knowing until morning if that child would recover from an alcohol overdose at one of these teenage discos. I am familiar on a number of fronts with the phenomenon of very young teenagers going to teenage discos. The premises they go to may be licensed but no alcohol is served in the room reserved for the disco. However, there is alcohol around it and an introduction to drugs around it. There are also other issues and problems because the children do not have the necessary emotional maturity. They are very young and they are being exploited by the money they pay to go in and in other ways.

There should be identity cards and an age threshold. People should not be fit to access these discos until they are 16. They can have private things at family level or in schools. This is a very serious matter for many parents. I have met people with harrowing stories. It would break one's heart to listen to them. I note the trauma in the house after what the parent mentioned above described to me. I ask the Leader to bring the relevant Minister to the House for a debate. It is up to the Minister and the civil servants in the Department to come up with possible solutions. One is identity cards and another is a minimum age for these events. The phenomenon of very young kids going to these discos is shocking, serious and has awful implications.