Today I raise the issue of the crisis that is the shortage of general practitioners, GPs, throughout this country. It is an issue I have raised in this Chamber many times, and I refer to and compliment the work recently done by The Sunday Business Post, which conducted a survey of GPs throughout the country to ascertain the extent of the problem. The results of that survey showed that 64% of GPs surveyed have now closed their doors to new patients. What does that mean? In County Monaghan, in both Carrickmacross and Monaghan town, GPs have closed their doors to new patients completely. I encountered a young couple who returned home with their two children to set up life again in County Monaghan. They approached every GP in the town and none would take them on. Where are these people meant to go? I can only imagine how stressful that is with two young children. They have now been told to approach doctors on call. That is the only option available to them. The doctor on call service is now so overwhelmed that it has capped the number of patients not registered with GPs who will be seen. That cohort includes this family. This is a very serious situation and it has been allowed to get worse under the Government's watch. I ask the Leader to call the Minister for Health before the Seanad to advise Members and the people as to what he is doing to address this serious issue.

The reality is that if someone gets sick he or she cannot go to his or her GP. Now we find that such people cannot go to a doctor on call service. Where will they end up? They will end up queueing, like everybody else, in accident and emergency departments. It is simply not good enough. Everyone knows that the GP is the first line of defence when someone gets sick. We talk about promoting primary care in order that we have a properly functioning system that alleviates the problems in accident and emergency departments. Here is a serious problem that needs to be addressed.

I concur with the sentiments expressed earlier by Senator Craughwell. What happened at the weekend falls far below the standard expected of anybody in elected office. In recent years Mr. Austin Stack has been engaged in a long-running battle to find out what happened to his father. As everybody knows, Deputy Adams facilitated a meeting in 2013, and he was taken to that meeting in a blacked-out van, which was ridiculous in 2013.

At the time, Austin was told that the perpetrators of that attack on his father were still alive and they had been disciplined. I use inverted commas - as youngsters do - on the word "discipline" because if the discipline is anything like the discipline our colleague received at the weekend than I am not inspired. Perhaps by way of making a proper apology to the Stack family for what happened at the weekend, our Sinn Féin colleagues in the House and in the Dáil might encourage their colleagues in the IRA to actually help the Stack family to find out exactly what happened to their father, and perhaps bring the perpetrators to justice?

I commend Senator Robbie Gallagher. The GP issue has been brought up with me regularly in Limerick also. It is a real concern and is worthy of debate because perhaps we need to look to a new model of GP services delivery.

I wish to speak today about Liam O'Flynn. It is important to remember Liam O'Flynn, who passed away last week. He was particularly close to my heart because when we lived in England in the 1970s, the emigrant experience was much tougher for my parents back then and for people of that generation. They would not get home to Ireland that often, maybe once a year if they were lucky. The music of Liam O'Flynn, and especially on the first album Prosperous, by Christy Moore - which is a Planxty album in all but name - really spoke to those people and it resonated with that generation. Like so many others, I followed Liam O'Flynn's career with huge admiration. I was lucky enough to be at the Planxty reunion concert in 2004. When the sound of Liam's uilleann pipes came soaring in at the beginning the huge cheer that went up from the audience was completely spontaneous. It spoke of the huge admiration for the splendour of his work. It is very important to mark the passing of this man. Liam O'Flynn worked with Seamus Heaney and with Shaun Davey. A piece of work by Liam O'Flynn is a song written by Shaun Davey called Winter's End. It is from a 1993 album called Out to An Other Side and I contend that it is the most magnificent piece of music ever written. It is important to commend the work of Liam O'Flynn and remember the great man who passed away last week.