Tom Clonan (Independent)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

I first wish to apologise because I had to leave to make up a quorum on the Joint Committee on Foreign Affairs and Defence. People there were presenting on some of the issues that the witnesses were referring to regarding how volatile things are at the moment and how febrile the world is. Even though I missed some of the presentations, I felt it informed some of what I caught from Professor O'Mahony. We have a hurricane approaching the Florida Keys at the moment. It has gone through Yucatán. Allied to that is all the geopolitical instability in the Middle East, with the potential for further escalation in time and possibly a nuclear exchange either in Ukraine or if Israel gets its way, because I think it is ultimately seeking confrontation with Iran before it goes nuclear. We have all these challenges on a macro level. On a micro level, we have people sleeping in doorways. I have four adult children and a teenager who have no prospect of owning their own home or making the decisions that we possibly took for granted about starting a family and so on.

In another life, as an academic, teaching moral philosophy, looking at the half-lives of cultural epochs, such as the Egyptian, Greek or Roman periods, the Dark Ages, the Enlightenment, or Renaissance, they all roughly halve in their duration. In referring to the 20th century, the age of modernism came to an end in 1945 and we have this post-modern period, but really, I think the post-modern period probably ended 24 years ago, around the turn of this century. I do not think we have a name yet for the space that we inhabit now. I like the acronym VUCA, for volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. It is certainly all of those things. We are at a point where there are existential questions about our survival as a species. It has never been harder in the history of political, cultural or philosophical thought to know what the right thing to do is, to distinguish between right and wrong, but it has never been more important that we distinguish between right and wrong.

In a very long-winded way - I was an academic - I thank the witnesses for putting this together. It is an attempt to go from the passive and reactive to the proactive, and to go from the tactical to the strategic, and to try to get to grips with this. I have a couple of small questions and welcome a response from anybody. In section 5(4), paragraphs (a) through to (d), relate to the composition of the membership of the commission, including gender, age, ethnicity and either English or Irish language speakers. Could I suggest including disability as a category of person? Every single one of us will be disabled at some point in our life. The World Health Organization tells us that everybody in the room and elsewhere will spend at least eight years of their lives disabled, normally towards the end of life, but increasingly with improvements in medicine, such as they are, they include people with acquired brain injuries, people who survive road traffic collisions, and people who survive the mass-disabling events that are taking place in the Middle East and elsewhere. When talking about universal design and how we move forward, it would be important, if possible, to incorporate that into it. I put that out to see what the witnesses think.

Regarding advisory and consultancy roles, I do not know how it could be incorporated, but I think it should be compulsory, every now and again, to include disruptors, that is, people who are not a seamless extension of the establishment, who are provocative and have views and opinions that maybe cause disequilibrium. That would be useful. With the groupthink in recent times, in this new period that we inhabited after the turn of the century, the Celtic tiger era, with all of its intellectual and ethical failures, everyone was ad idem.

I do not know whether there is a profession of disrupters yet. I do not know what we would call them. That is it. I want to thank the witnesses for their presentations and congratulate Deputy Ó Cathasaigh on the initiative. Do the witnesses have any observation on the possibility of including these types of categories in the membership of the committee or appointment as consultants?