During the Order of Business in the Seanad, I said: I was very interested in the statements made last night on the flooding and also in what Senator Alex White said today when he almost repeated the words of the Deputy Leader last night that we brought this flooding on ourselves. We cannot blame nature. We have done things in the past few years that make us responsible...

It reminds me of the position of the economy. When somebody asks us later what we did that brought the economy to its knees, we will say we stopped working for a day and threatened to stop again next week and that we crossed the Border to purchase goods because we had made ourselves uncompetitive.

I came into the House in 1993 following a meeting with some Canadians when their Prime Minister was here. They said that in 1922, when we formed the State, the economies, populations and natural resources of Canada and Argentina were equal. Seventy years later Argentina was bankrupt and Canada was a G7 member. Nobody but the citizens of Argentina was to blame for the running of its economy in those years.

They allowed a military dictatorship to happen. They elected Peròn. They might have done other things also. Those of us fortunate to have responsibility in these Houses do not understand we have made ourselves so uncompetitive.

I went to Dundalk a few months ago when a store was closing down and asked the people whether they would have to go to Newry to find work and they said no, because they would earn only one third of what they would earn in Dundalk. I was asked on Radio Ulster last night whether it was true that pay in the South was a multiple of that in the North. It is our responsibility to solve the problems in this economy. Let us not act like Nero who fiddled while Rome burned.