Ruairi Quinn (Dublin South East, Labour)

I listened with interest to my colleague, Deputy Reilly, state that change has come. It has been my experience in this republic and Chamber that change does not come but is driven by the passion and energy of citizens who want to be free. It is dragged through against the resistance of conservatives who believe that anything other than the order they have inherited cannot stand because any change would lead to the entire edifice falling down around their feet. This change has not come, nor has it matured or found its place in the sun because today is different from yesterday. What is different today is that a reluctant, so-called republican Government, which more properly earns the title of "publicans' Government", has been forced to bow to the inevitable but it has not bowed far enough.

This is a fundamentally bad Bill. While it introduces some necessary changes, these changes could have been introduced many years ago. I recall, as an Opposition spokesperson for finance in 1991 and 1992, making proposals in this Chamber to at least harmonise the tax code for the non-conjugal couples to whom Deputy Reilly referred and the cohabiting couples to whom Deputy Ó Snodaigh referred. I was told on the floor of the House and in friendly off-the-record exchanges with officials and the Minister for Finance that the tax code does not anticipate social change. This was an unwritten law within the Department of Finance. While this is not an unreasonable observation given that it is not the duty of the Department or a Finance Bill to anticipate or promote change, the Department has an obligation to reflect change.

This State is six years away from the centenary of the declaration of the republic in 1916. While we have come a long way in terms of time, we have an awful long journey to travel if we are to make the republic a reality. In any republic, on any continent of the globe the fundamental principle is that all citizens are free and equal before the law. If and when this legislation is enacted, whether in the current or an amended form, we will not be able to say we have a republic in 2010 because all citizens will not be free and equal before the law. There will be those of us who are free citizens and happen to enjoy the status of being married, those of us who are free and able to enjoy the status of having a civil partner, those of us who are able to have children naturally, with medical assistance or by adoption and those of us in loving relationships who will not have that right. This is not republican legislation. It does not deliver and does not go far enough.

The Labour Party has been to the fore in promoting liberation in this area and other areas. In the time remaining to me, I will address those who express a concern that we have a secular agenda. In the words of various commentators in the media, my party is anti-religious, has no respect for the belief systems of other citizens in this republic and wants to drive some form of secularisation of the State to the point at which religion would have no place. None of this is true. The place in the western world where religion flourishes most is the United States, a republic where there is a complete and absolute separation between church and state. The places where the church languishes either in irrelevance, dispute or abandonment are the countries in which it used to dominate, namely, Italy, Spain, Portugal and even Poland.

I need not mention where we, in this island, are today. Next month we will have the spectacle of the Irish bishops, who have been summoned to another country by the head of another state who happens to be the head of their religion, answering for their behaviour in this country. We do not know what will be the outcome of this development. There was, however, a time when these same officeholders would have told this assembly what to legislate for and how to legislate and that we could not trespass beyond the boundaries they had set for us. That day has gone and will not return in my lifetime and, I hope, the lifetime of my grandchildren. They will, I hope, be republican citizens who will be free to choose to believe and practise whatever they want and, when summoned before a court, will be equal in the eyes of the republican Constitution, both as believers and non-believers.

Let me say this on the issue of belief. Everybody is a believer. There is no such thing as a non-believer, just as there is no such thing as a non-national, non-Catholic or non-person. There are citizens who believe different things. Some people believe in God, while others believe in atheism, humanism or agnosticism. We all believe and need the protection and security of a republican state and its constitution to give equality in terms of the rights of belief and to behave in a manner informed by our conscience. We need the laws and courts of the land and the enforcers of those laws to ensure that the manner in which we behave and act out our beliefs does not impinge on the liberties, rights and beliefs of our neighbours.

Attempts to argue there are those among us who have a destructive, secular agenda are the sting of a dying wasp. This claim is not true. We have a liberating republican agenda which seeks to complete the task commenced 94 years ago in this city on this island when the republic was proclaimed. The ringing poetry of the Proclamation is not echoed in the words of our Constitution which does not treat all the children of the nation equally and, as a consequence, does not treat all citizens of the nation equally. Some day the words of the Proclamation will come true. Members of this House will make them law but we will not do so today or for as long as a Bill of this temerity, timidity and inadequacy is put before us by a Government which claims to be the republican party when its better boast is to be the publicans' party.

It is necessary in this discourse to recognise that what cannot be achieved today should not get in the way of making as much progress as possible or serve as an excuse for doing nothing. What cannot be achieved today cannot be used as an excuse for not remembering that while we only be able to do some business because of the conservative majority on the Government side, the majority will have the full and final word on how far this assembly can go.

There is a wonderful inscription on the base of the Parnell Monument at the top of O'Connell Street, a beautiful piece of sculpture, architecture and design. Among the many phrases Parnell uttered to the greatest imperial power at that time were the immortal words:

[N]o man has the right to set limits to the match of our nation. No man has the right to say [...] "Thus far shall thou go and no further"

We will go as far as the Constitution allows us to go, but that is not the end destination. Until such time as we arrive, this will not be the Republic signed up to in the Proclamation of 1916. That task remains to be done.

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