Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú) | Oireachtas source

For the last few weeks, the political establishment, North and South, has been celebrating the Good Friday Agreement. For sure, the Good Friday Agreement was a landmark agreement which brought to an end decades of horror and violence. Thousands of people are alive today as a result of the Good Friday Agreement. We must celebrate it for happening. It was amazing that it happened. In my youth, the violence in the North seemed intractable. It seemed there were a number of situations around the world, such as in Palestine and the North, that would never be fixed and would go on for generations. Thankfully, through the work of so many people, that violence came to an end.

The elephant in the room is that the Good Friday Agreement is currently not operational. That is important to say and to understand. The institutions central to the Good Friday Agreement are, for the most part, broken. They are in tatters on the floor. The Assembly has collapsed, the Executive is AWOL and the North-South Ministerial Council is defunct. The recent celebrations of the Good Friday Agreement were akin to having a birthday party for a person who no longer has a pulse. It is a bad reflection on our generation of politics that we have been given such a valuable thing and we have allowed it to break up and fall apart. The Good Friday Agreement is not a living agreement at the moment. I believe that responsibility lies squarely at the door of the British and Irish Governments. The North is being held to ransom by the "un-Democratic Unionist Party". This is being allowed to happen by the British and Irish Governments, which are supposed to be the guarantors of the Good Friday Agreement which but are not guaranteeing anything at the moment. That political paralysis has enormous societal costs.

The North of Ireland is in the middle of a major political and economic crisis. It is seldom debated here in the South. Families are being hammered by an ever-increasing cost-of-living crisis. Some 480,000 people are on hospital waiting lists in the North of Ireland at the moment. Hospitals are shedding life and death services. Maternity services are being lost in Causeway Hospital. The accident and emergency service has been lost in Enniskillen hospital. Emergency surgery services have been lost in Daisy Hill Hospital. The five Stormont parties all signed up to service centralisation and these parties are now standing idly by when hospitals are under threat. Indeed, Michelle O'Neill was Minister of Health when she launched the blueprint for centralisation, the Bengoa report. Michelle O'Neill said at the time that she admitted that people would have to travel further for healthcare. She said there would be investment in hospital capacity, primary care and step-down facilities with that centralisation. Of course, none of that has come to pass. I pay credit to Gemma Brolly, who is the chairperson of the Save Causeway Hospital campaign, and all of those fighting for hospital services in the North of Ireland at the moment.

Some 300,000 people are living in poverty and 45,000 people are on housing waiting lists. Key public servants are being forced to strike day-in, day-out. Today, teachers across the Six Counties are out of their classrooms and on the pickets due to the fact that they have the worst wages that exist in Ireland or Britain at the moment. On top of this, we have an incredible situation whereby the British Government is now threatening an austerity budget on the people of the North of Ireland, which could be up to 20% of the budget that is already there. We are starting at a horrendous place with regard to public expenditure, yet the threat is to cut it.

One of the political issues that really frustrates me is that in this time where the parties of the North are not sitting in Stormont, are not doing their job to fix the issues, and have taken a wage of £4 million since the election, the only political action that they have taken is to jack up the rates for struggling families across the North of Ireland. Sinn Féin, the DUP, the SDLP and the Alliance Party have jacked up the rates on families who can hardly feed themselves. If it was Fianna Fáil raising the rates on families in such economic difficulty, Sinn Féin in the South would be hammering it left, right and centre, and rightly so, yet Sinn Féin has been at the heart of raising those rates in the North of Ireland for people who cannot afford to pay them.

This Government needs a change of direction. We need to reform Stormont so no party, whether the DUP, Sinn Féin or anybody else, can crash it. We need to stop the wages of MLAs who will not do their job. Nobody should get paid for that length of time when they are refusing to do their jobs. We need to devolve taxation powers from London to the North of Ireland so that the North of Ireland has the levers necessary to create an economic environment so that it can create jobs and good wages for young people so that they can raise their families here in Ireland and so that we have the funds to invest in housing, health and education. For the last eight years, Stormont has had the power to change corporation taxes, but it has not had the ambition to do so. Unfortunately, there is still the politics of dependency on the block grant in the North. It is akin to a landlord of old coming over to Ireland and throwing the money in the air and the local politicians scrummaging on the ground to pick up what they can. We need to change that political attitude.

We need the political system here to change too. We have brought about a Bill so that Northern MPs would have the right to speak in the Dáil. Nothing is stopping it. We have brought about a Bill to create a commission of investigation into British collusion. Next week, we will bring about a Bill which will mandate the Irish Government to bring the British Government to the European Court of Human Rights if it proceeds with the legacy Bill. The legacy Bill is a kick in the stomach for the Good Friday Agreement. This Government needs to fight the legacy Bill tooth and nail because it is an amnesty for British murder in Ireland.

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