Seán Ó Fearghaíl (Kildare South, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I am not sure I will need the full 15 minutes. It has been a very interesting debate to follow so far. Points have been made about the Minister of State's speech and the fact it did not address the Bill that is before us. The Minister of State is now leaving the Chamber. Perhaps the fact that the Minister of State's speech was focused for 28 minutes on putting his response into context and spent less than two minutes on the content of the Bill indicates the real problem we have.

I freely admit that if a Bill of this nature had come before us four or five years ago, I would not have been minded to support it, nor would my party. The economic crisis we have gone through has exposed profound weaknesses in how we govern ourselves. We have seen it take a heavy toll on Irish people. It demanded that we take a hard, honest look at how we do the business of politics and it challenged the values and priorities that shaped the country leading to the crash. Like everybody in this House, in the course of the 2011 general election campaign, I listened to a great deal of justifiable criticism on the doors, from people who said they were in many respects disgusted and revolted by the political system. They saw the political system as contributing to the economic crash that bore so heavily on them. When they voted in 2011, they voted in large measure for people and for parties that promised change. One of the reasons we are now living through a period of extraordinary political disillusionment on the part of the public with the body politic is that it has seen the failure of the people it elected to government, who made innumerable promises, one of the most significant being that of radical political reform and a democratic revolution.

Not alone has the Government not delivered a radical, political revolution, it is not prepared to support legislation such as this Bill, which given the experience we have had is necessary to move us forward into the space this whole country wants to be in.

Yet we hear from Deputy Pat Rabbitte, for whom people have had much resect - they certainly like listening to his very often interesting quips - that in the course of an election promises are made, one gets people's support, and when it is all over, all promises are null and void. If we did not learn from the mistake made in 2011 of treating the people with such contempt, we do not deserve to be in this House and to continue to have the privilege of representing the people, because we are not acting upon the mandate we sought and got from them.

I accept that the Constitutional Convention was one response on the part of the Government to the commitment it made to revolutionise the political system and bring about a democratic revolution. I was very privileged to attend the Constitutional Convention as part of the 33 member Oireachtas team. I was struck, not by the role played by the Oireachtas Members in the convention but by the enormous pride the 66 citizen members had at the opportunity to participate in something they saw as being historic and momentous in the history of the country. On Friday the people will vote in two referendums and make a decision on whether the two provisions should be included in the Constitution. The Constitution as a document governs how the political system works but it also sets out our intrinsic values as a nation, the ethos we have as a people and the country we want to inhabit.

The disappointment I feel following the Constitutional Convention must be reflected in the disappointment of citizen members that so far on from the completion of the convention, four or five of its reports have still not been considered by this House. The reports that have been considered have been discussed briefly, very often at the end of a Dáil term and certainly without adequate consideration being given to them. The particular issue before us today on economic, social and cultural rights was the subject of debate at the ninth meeting of the convention. It was one of the topics, which I expect the Acting Chairman will agree, that excited much public interest because it was about the bread and butter issues that face us now and our children in the future. I refer to housing, social security, essential health care, the rights of people with disabilities and linguistic and cultural rights. Those rights are enshrined in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. On considering them, we must accept that we have very real problems. The body politic has not honoured the promises it has made to the people to deliver on those particular rights, and there is a need to consider enshrining, as Deputies Pringle and Healy have said, those rights in the Constitution in order that they can be justiciable. It was interesting to hear the Minister of State, Deputy Sherlock, someone I very much respect, make a point in his contribution that was identical to the point made by none other than the former Progressive Democrats leader, Michael McDowell, namely, that we should not create a situation in which those rights would be justiciable, that we should not hand over to the Judiciary the rights to determine what might happen. One can understand the desire of the people when faced with a political failure to deliver on those rights to see some other body, in this instance the Judiciary, have the opportunity to input into the area.

Let us consider what has been happening in the housing area. Deputy Wallace made the point earlier that the State is transferring responsibility to the private sector. I do not think that is the case. The State is talking about making future investment in social housing but the reality is that very little is happening on an operational basis currently. Very few counties will see the significant delivery of houses in 2015 or 2016. Given that the social housing list contains 100,000 people, one will be a very long time on the list before one has any reasonable prospect of being housed if we allow the current situation to continue. In fact, legislation introduced by the party of the Minister of State, Deputy Ann Phelan, under the then Minister of State, Deputy Jan O’Sullivan, would make traditional Labour Party members turn in their grave. A situation was created through the housing assistance payment, HAP, whereby someone on a local authority waiting list hoping to get a house would be removed from the list, ipso facto, once he or she was in receipt of HAP, as he or she would be deemed to have their housing need met. It was a very good way of reducing the list but not a way to address the aspiration of so many people to have a house. The Government has failed to deliver and has created no real impetus in the social housing programme. In fact, there has been a cultural change to a situation in which the vision is that housing will be provided by the private sector, although it is not currently being provided by it because not enough houses are being built to meet the need in the first instance.

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