Michael D Higgins (Galway West, Labour)

I wish to share time with Deputy Quinn.

It is important that we leave this debate with a semblance of hope for the many thousands of people who have been contacting Deputies on all sides, that we tell them there is a future for Ireland and a future for Europe beyond the incredible failure into which we have sunk. A real social Europe can be created. That social Europe is not a common market, but a European union where Article 122 will mean something, which is that countries that have signed the treaties "in a spirit of solidarity" will respond to each other. That is important.

Out of the chaos into which we have been plunged by a Government that was uncaring and incompetent, a real republic can be created. It is not a matter of us having lost something that has to be recovered now. Right through the history of this State we have dodged building a real republic. Such a republic would have, for example, a deliberative discourse where citizens and what they say would count. Put more simply, after this mess, will it be easier for people to feel that their concerns and worries and their aspirations and hopes for the future will be taken into account? That is part of the deliberative discourse of a republic.

Equally, citizens will require that institutions come into existence that are genuinely transformative. It is the difference, for example, between the petty narrow nationalism in the early years of the State and those like Seán O'Casey, James Connolly and others who felt that a republic should be emancipatory and there should be a social floor below which people will not fall in health and housing. We are not hearing that now; we are hearing about a deal that was done rather badly.

If the Government believed in a real republic, it would go out with optimism and it would not operate with evasion. It would not say, "Politics in general has failed. What we need now is a set of celebrities". It would not say in an insulting way that only young people can envisage where we might go to now. This involves people of all ages. I speak from a position of authority. The Government would not say, for example, that because we have a disgraceful absence of women in this Chamber, this is a matter for young women only. There are those of us who know and respect the older women who took on the burden of feminism here and fewer still, whom can I easily identify, who stood with them in making the case for feminism.

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