I welcome members back after the holidays. I am sure they all had a good time. I apologise for missing the meeting in Malahide yesterday. I was at a Council of Europe meeting. I believe some members of the joint committee tried to make mileage out of my absence. I am glad they did not succeed. It is a pity there should be such a situation.
Business of Joint Committee.
On that issue, I was asked where the Chairman was. I said I did not know but that I thought the Chairman ought to have been there. I assume, Chairman, that the visit was arranged through your office. You missed other meetings which I thought were very important. It was not a personal attack on you. On such an important occasion, given that hundreds of people could have been drowned, I thought you would have been there as Chairman of the committee. You were, as you say, elsewhere in Europe, but I was not aware of that, as I had not been told. I did not try to make mileage out of your absence. I thought, however, that the Chairman of the Joint Committee on Transport should have been there or that an apology would have been made to those who were present in order that they would know what the situation was. I cannot think of a more important issue for you to attend to.
I was at a Council of Europe meeting. I have been to the site and seen the bridge. I have been fully briefed on the incident. The clerk explained that I was at a Council of Europe meeting. I wanted to facilitate the committee, which is why I arranged for the meeting to go ahead.
I would have preferred if you had been there.
This committee has met more than any other in the Houses. I have missed two meetings. We have had meetings which lasted for four and five hours——
We have indeed.
——and I have always tried to adopt a bipartisan approach. As a representative who attends committee meetings for ten or 15 minutes on some occasions, the Deputy is in no position to criticise my performance as Chairman of the committee.
That is absolutely and categorically untrue. If you take the time to look at the minutes of meetings, you will see that my contributions have been——
We will move on.
I cannot allow that to stay on the record. The record shows that, unlike yourself, I have been here for all of the meetings for particularly long periods of time. In my view, you have been absent on occasions when you should have been here.
We will get the record.
You are either Chairman of the committee or Chairman of the Council of Europe. You should do your job.
We will get the record of the number of meetings I have missed and make it available to the Deputy. He will find he is wrong. This is not the first time he has been wrong.
The Chairman should do his job and get on with the meeting.
I just want to keep the record straight. I will not allow that kind of political back-stabbing to take place at this committee.
There is no back-stabbing by me. You were not at the meeting. You should have been there. That is it.
The journalists the Deputy was trying to get to shaft me felt it was political back-stabbing.
You shaft yourself.
We will now ensure our phones are turned off. We are not in private session.
The joint committee went into private session at 10.40 a.m. and resumed in public session at 10.50 a.m.