I support Senator McGahon's proposal to invite EU Commissioner Ms Mairead McGuinness to the House to discuss the sanctions. I am sure the Commissioner, who is from Ireland, would be very happy to address the Seanad on the mechanisms and methodologies being used to impose sanctions on Russia. Hopefully, we will see uniformity across Europe and the world in the imposition of these sanctions. It would be a very interesting discussion to have if the Commissioner was prepared to make herself available.

Today is World Book Day, as colleagues have said. Books are important for people developing their knowledge, even from a later perspective. The happiness and the opportunities that books give people are wonderful. However, many people cannot read books, including people who are visually impaired or who have print disabilities. The Marrakesh Treaty, which was passed a number of years ago, deals with copyright issues for books being transformed into digital formats that can be accessed by people with print disabilities. The National Council for the Blind of Ireland, NCBI, is the agent in this country tasked with the responsibility of producing books in digital format, not just for blind and visually impaired people, but also people who might suffer from dyslexia and other conditions. Government funding in this area is important because access to print material is critical. Let us imagine a library where 90% of the shelves are empty because books are not available. That is a library one would not be inclined to go into. Unfortunately, 90% of the books in the world are not available in digital form and cannot be accessed through audio, Braille or other forms of digital transposition. We have a lot of work to do in this area because 100% of books should be available to everybody. Nobody should have their choices limited simply because books are not available in the format they would use to read them. It is a point worth noting and is something of which we should all be aware. It is so important to make resources available to turn the 10% into 100%.

I will begin with a text message I received this morning from a friend who worked in Kyiv and who I had the pleasure of meeting when I was an election monitor. It reads as follows:

Talking with all my co-workers, it's like 1939-1941...trying to flee West, jumping on trains, finding cars, leaving wives and kids at the border..the amount of destruction to infrastructure - horrible.

That is from a man who worked with the World Bank in Kyiv until last autumn. We stand with Ukraine today. The suggestion of Senator McGahon, endorsed by Senator Conway, that we invite Commissioner McGuinness to the House should be given serious consideration.

I ask for a debate on the HSE national service plan, a service plan amounting to €20.7 billion that our good friends in Sinn Féin never acknowledge. To be fair to Senators Gavan and Maria Byrne, they come in here and talk about the problems at University Hospital Limerick regularly but there is something fundamentally wrong with our health service when the biggest ever budget of €20.7 billion, plus an additional €350 million for a 2022 waiting list action plan, is not addressing the problems. There is something fundamentally wrong with the HSE and it needs to be addressed. All of us want to see waiting lists reduced, hospital bed capacity increased, and home care and social care packages enhanced and increased. We need an urgent debate, not just about Sláintecare or universal healthcare, but about putting the patient, the person who needs care, at the core of what we do in our health service. I ask that we have that debate as a matter of extreme urgency. Indeed, we should have a rolling debate on a series of issues related to healthcare and HSE.