Michael D Higgins (Galway West, Labour)

I want to begin with the Minister of State, Deputy Seán Power's, assertion that he recognises that we are speaking about a basic human right and in the few minutes available I want to lay out a few fundamentals. If he recognises that what my colleague, Deputy Howlin, has proposed, for which I congratulate him, in the name of the Labour Party for the second time deals with a matter of right, a right delayed is a right denied. That is a fundamental. We are not speaking about a concession and we are not speaking about a concession that is adjusted to the social prejudice of the day. I have been through all of that in all of the different referenda and I want to make a few points clearly.

I saw the number of people who were wounded when we had a debate about the right to civil divorce and we had to go through the entire exercise again. At that stage, my colleague and former Deputy, Mervyn Taylor, was a Minister and we were members of the Cabinet in 1993. There have been many references to courageous decisions that had to be taken, including the decriminalisation legislation associated with former Deputy Máire Geoghegan-Quinn. I supported her in that and I recall her thanking me publicly in Galway for supporting her as a Labour member of the Cabinet when her own colleagues were undermining her in the constituency and elsewhere. The truth of it was when we negotiated our participation in Government on every occasion, the Fianna Fáil Government was forced to accept reforming legislation on divorce. It was forced to accept reforming legislation on family planning and it has been forced, yet again, to recognise that we are speaking about a human right.

Second, the Government does not have legislation proposed. What they have in the Government programme is a scheme for legislation. As a former member of Cabinet, I can say that a scheme for legislation is not legislation and the heads of legislation are very far from the text of legislation. It is clear that many of the Minister of State's colleagues intend to introduce such extraneous matters as to completely obfuscate the issue.

We are speaking of a rights issue and a citizenship issue. We are speaking about people who are citizens in the institution that includes a sexual relationship and let us recognise that such a thing exists, that they have the same right to participate personally and institutionally in the life of the State as equal citizens with protection and responsibilities before the law. That is what is at stake.

If the Minister of State intended to add all of the other different forms of people who find themselves living together — Deputy Mansergh is worried about very elderly people who manage to be brothers and sisters and of course we have compassion for that — and if he were to take Deputy Mansergh's rubbish and take, for example, all of the members of a monastery and divide them into couples and state for the purposes of doing the adjustment in law that the Minister will now have to deal with that as well, it would be not only a distracting but a dangerous nonsense because Deputy Mansergh does not have the guts to face up to what is a rights issue and it makes a mockery of his much vaunted support for republicanism in the general sense. No republican can vote against legislation like this and if the Minister wanted to extend it to include all of the taxation benefits, all of the other legal adjustments and whatever, he could accept this Bill and tag them on because then he would be doing the task of administration.

We are in a difficult position in our Parliament in any event. I say this as somebody who has been here more than 20 years and nine years in the Seanad. The Executive has an exclusive monopoly over the right to introduce legislation in practical terms. We have just heard speeches that give instances of the very few occasions on which Government accepted legislation that came from this side of the House but if the Government claims a monopoly on the right to introduce legislation, why then not take this legislation and use it as a framework and make it perfect if they wish? If the Minister wants to be republican as Deputy Mansergh put it, why not go on and recognise civil marriage as well? Deputy Lenihan, in a totally confusing speech, stated marriage is challenged and he quoted, for example, the Article of the Constitution, Article 41.3.1°:

The State pledges itself to guard with special care the institution of Marriage, on which the Family is founded, and to protect it against attack.

I can tell the Minister of State, and the Fianna Fáil Party in its different Governments and the Progressive Democrats, that they have done more to undermine marriage because of their contract with speculation than anybody proposing legislation on this side of the House. Was it strengthening and protecting marriage when people were compulsorily forced into mortgage slavery, when people can no longer afford a house, or where people are committed to commuting such long distances they can no longer spend some time with their families? Let us cut the nonsense about all of this. The exclusive reliance on the market undermined marriage and the family so systematically and so uncritically that it——

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