Shane Ross (Dublin South, Independent) | Oireachtas source

The rhetoric being employed is old-fashioned and irrelevant and would not be related to by young people who are not particularly interested in the trades union movement and would not respond particularly favourably to the kind of buttons being pressed by this motion. It is the politics of confrontation and the past, and it is the politics of class warfare which I hoped was long forgotten.

It is not particularly helpful in Ireland to constantly evoke the ghosts of the past in politics on any side. If we did that in the Northern Ireland context, we would never have had a working peace process. If we always evoked the names of Carson and others, as well as the taboos of Northern Ireland, we would invite the resurrection of sectarianism which is just below the surface. I acknowledge that this motion has been moved sincerely and the disappointment of the left in that those aspirations for which men of the past apparently strived have not been achieved. Nevertheless, we should look forward rather than back all the time.

There is a good point to be made here but the rhetoric is so divisive that the point is lost. Trades union and their leaders in particular have been a disappointment in recent times. Although I would not put it in the same words as Deputies Higgins or Boyd Barrett, they have certainly let down their members because they are the most conservative people in Irish society. They have their noses in the trough and the last thing they want is radical change of any sort, as they are beneficiaries of the existing system. One need only consider the guys who are champions of the quangos to see how much they have benefited. In the recent years during the Celtic tiger, trades union leaders were rewarded for their complicity in what was going on in social partnership and elsewhere, in what was a cosy nest. They had quangos specifically created to provide themselves with jobs and income, and all of them bought into that process. Some of those quangos still exist.

Such people are not doing me, as a member of the National Union of Journalists, any favours. I do not need them but the people who the unions purport to represent at a different level and on different wages have been betrayed because trades union leaders have benefited so much from a system which was so rotten.

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