I thank the Senator for his brevity.

I certainly agree with Senators Michael McDowell and Catherine Ardagh who spoke about the mortgage crisis and the sale of loans. We will hear all of the technical debate on Basel II, the impairment of our balance sheets and the ratio of loans to assets in the banks. As it has come down the road from the European Union, we cannot be oblivious to it. We were quick to deliver NAMA to large enterprises, banks, large developers and everyone else it suited at the time. Why can the common person not have a NAMA? It is the common-sense way forward. Certainly, the banks have to look after the balance sheets, but they could be dealt with through a special vehicle to deal with all impaired loans. That is all. I simply wanted to comment on that matter.

The national development plan was unveiled last week with great fanfare, press and photo shoots, but I missed the exact details. All I heard was about Ardee and Drogheda from Senator Gerald Nash, but I missed that part of it. The amount of infrastructure to be built and planned is immense, as is the related detail.

I have one query for the Leader. There are 60 blocklayers and 27 plasterers in apprenticeship schemes. Who will build everything? Unless the infrastructure is virtual, how will it be built? It is not possible. We previously discussed apprenticeship schemes. They were supposed to be ramped up, but that has not happened. The issue has been talked about for the past two years. We will have to tackle the issue head-on or it will not progress.

We met representatives from the Association of Irish Local Government, AILG, today. The Leader has worked hard on this issue. Nearly 60% of councillors are now worse off than they were before the new deal on pay and conditions was implemented. It is hard to fathom. They are the figures supplied by the AILG. I know the Minister of State, Deputy John Paul Phelan, has done a lot of work on this and intends to do a lot more. The sooner we can make progress with this the better for everyone.

I would like to comment on the debate taking place around Permanent TSB and vulture funds. I agree with Senator McDowell that the public deserves to know the full extent of non-performing loans across all of the banks, not just those which were bailed out but also those which are regulated by the Central Bank.

Many issues around banking have failed to be resolved. The problems we are encountering now will occur again because everything is cyclical. The banks are dealing with the provision of loans in exactly the same manner as they did ten years ago just before the boom. All of the national newspapers are subscribing to this because they are all advertising loans and houses. The same thing is beginning to happen again.

Why are some banks offering clinics at 7 a.m. or 8 a.m. on a Saturday where people can order mortgages? Why are banks beginning to write to people again? There is a need to scrutinise what has occurred and what we can learn from it. There is also a need to look at our education system and educate people before they take out a mortgage about the consequences of default.

A regular mortgage in my county of €200,000 over 30 years at the current variable rate of about 3.6% would result in interest payable of €130,500. The banks are fleecing the ordinary consumers who they are there to serve. The taxpayer has bailed out some of these institutions and will do so again. As sure as tomorrow is Wednesday this will happen again. We should consider this issue in an outside-of-the-box manner.

Why should an ordinary consumer without any financial expertise be able to walk into a bank and subscribe to or receive information from it about a product which is significantly financially lucrative for the bank? Should that not be done through an independent intermediary with no links whatsoever to any financial institution which is independently regulated by the regulator? There is a need to re-examine this issue because we will be back at square one. I ask the Leader for a debate with the Minister for Finance on this general issue and other issues around banking.

Like Senator Devine, I would like to thank the library service for the very comprehensive document it produced on elderly care. I have previously stated that the number of people aged over 65 now totals 637,000 and by 2030 the figure will be over 1 million. That is why we published the national plan for our health service. We currently have 2.6 beds per 1,000 of population, whereas the average in the OECD is 4.3.

Some 51% of people who occupy hospital beds are aged over 65 so we need to plan ahead and build hospitals. The Government has just published the national development plan which includes a comprehensive programme for building hospitals. From 1978 to 2008, no new hospital was built even though the country was flush with money, whether that was false or otherwise. Three new hospitals are being built at present and a further seven will be set in progress in the next three years.

In respect of elderly care, I have published a Bill relating to home care providers. One can serve ten years in prison but on the day one comes out, one can set up a company to provide home care without being scrutinised or cross-checked. We debated the Bill but I ask the Leader to allow it to come back into the House for Report Stage. With a growing elderly population there will be a greater demand for home care. At the health committee last Wednesday we learned that there were 29,000 people in community hospitals and private nursing homes and the number will be approximately 42,000 by 2030 so we need more home care and we need proper regulation of the sector.

I raised the question of Hinkley Point in a major debate in Parliament several years ago and I strongly support the views of Senator Grace O'Sullivan on the subject. On the sale of 20,000 mortgages to vulture funds, I wonder if people have forgotten that "eviction" is a dirty word in this country. It is unconscionable that a Government would collaborate in any way in the selling out of the people of Ireland to foreign mercenaries, which is basically what is happening. Not only did these monstrous groups avoid paying tax they also, as Senator Butler pointed out, landed the taxpayer with the costs of rehousing people, leading to the laughable situation where the Irish taxpayer is paying for evictions. It is something we need to look at. The National Housing Co-Operative Bill is on the Order Paper and I gather Deputy John McGuinness will be introducing a revised version. It is something we must face. We have to face down the Department of Finance, which has behaved in an appalling manner in this situation, and the ECB. It is a moral outrage that the ECB should be pushing to have Irish people evicted from their homes as these are the blackguards who got us into this mess by forcing us to buy out bondholders at 100% when they were sold at 5% or 10%.

A group of Senators from different groups had a very positive meeting this afternoon about the decision of RTÉ to cease terrestrial broadcasting of political commentary programmes such as "Oireachtas Report" and move it all online. In a country which has a very patchy broadband network, this is ridiculous. RTÉ should be reminded that it is a public service broadcaster and if it treated any other programme in the way it treats "Oireachtas Report", it would have virtually no people watching. We will be having another meeting next week and it it hoped to invite RTÉ to send a representative. It would be very good if Seanad Éireann could show a united front in regard to this. We should not migrate from terrestrial broadcasting but should include online broadcasting as part of the service. If we can stick together on this we can get somewhere. We faced RTÉ down on the attempted cessation of long-wave transmission, which is of such benefit to elderly Irish people in England.