Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I watched the video clip on social media of the truck starting its mad, evil slalom down that Nice road. I can only imagine the horror as it careered looking for death. Sadly, on that Friday night, one did not even have to imagine. I followed on so-called social media - perhaps others here did so also - what was happening in the coup in Istanbul and Ankara. I followed it live on Periscope. I saw the incredible bravery of the citizens of those cities as they stood up and fought to preserve their democracy. They stood in front of and on top of the tanks that faced them and tried to blind them. There was one incident that I hate to recall but in a sense it was similar to what happened in Nice. Soldiers in an armoured vehicle went down a road in Ankara and ploughed through their fellow Turkish people. As the hand-held phone turned, one saw a beheaded torso sitting dead on the road.

What a weekend of sadness it was. We also saw a sergeant of the Marines - heroes to American people, the modern day Daniel Boones - obviously traumatised and mentally ill after serving in Iraq, killing three policemen. We also remember them. They died in the former French colony in Baton Rouge. It is as if the bodies keep falling since that day when something happened that we could never have imagined, when someone flew a plane into a trade centre. Now, someone has used a truck in a way we could never have thought of. There is a sense that we should just shout "Stop" - that we need a different constitution, a bigger constitution. We need a different Bastille Day, one with peace and mercy at its core. As others said, all we can do is kneel with the parents of those who died near that Nice strand and remember the words of the Trojan mother Hecuba when she said in response to her child being thrown from the walls of the city, crushed and broken:

Oh to clasp thy tender limbs, a mother's fondest joy! Oh to breathe thy fragrant breath! ... Why have ye in terror of this child been guilty of murder never matched before?

See this speech in context