Aodhán Ó Ríordáin (Dublin North Central, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Ceann Comhairle for affording me the opportunity to raise the topic with my colleagues and I thank the Minister for Justice and Equality for being here in person. I think the Minister will agree with all of us that this is an unbelievably appalling scenario that has played out in front of our eyes in the past number of days. In the short amount of time allotted to me, I wish to make two main points.

The first relates to the independence of the inquiry that needs to take place and what happens to the report when it is given to the Ombudsman for Children. Will it be published and will we be able to dig deep into the reasons this was allowed to happen? I am willing to accept the bona fides of the gardaí and the HSE to a certain extent. I hope the Minister will agree with me that what is really at the core of this episode and circus is a pure, raw, naked and poisonous racism that lies at the heart of Irish society. This goes across the political system and into journalism, the gardaí and the HSE. We are willing to believe the worst of some of the communities that live in this land, most notably the Roma and Traveller communities. There are journalists and politicians who will not be involved in these investigations and will probably not appear in whatever report is produced on this situation who have significant questions to answer about the climate of fear and the undermining and dehumanising of communities that is taking place day in, day out in daily newspapers and our television screens that makes people in this country believe the worst of the Roma and Traveller communities and many other communities in this State. I will read out a line from a journalist from the Irish Independent who wrote a scurrilous piece about the Roma community recently. I must apologise for my language. The journalist discussed an encounter with a member of the Roma community. The article included the line "cue the usual bullshit you get from the Roma any time you challenge them - lots of spitting and evil-eye finger pointing". The article went on to state that:

But if we allow the Roma, or the indigenous junkies, to completely sap our native instinct to dip into our pocket when we see someone who is in a bad way then we won't just have lost one of the better aspects of our nature. We shall have given it away.

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