Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The Minister of State's response was disappointing. He used the phrase "all relevant players ... move ... from confrontation." There has been no confrontation by the Catalan Government or people. If one watches all of the media coverage, what one will see is people trying to assert their rights peacefully and in a dignified way. Confrontation is certainly not how I would describe it as. They were attacks by one group on another.

There is a misunderstanding of how Catalan society has reached this point. For over a decade there have been attempts by successive Catalan Governments led by different political parties to find a different kind of constitutional arrangement within the Spanish state, either through greater devolution or now independence. The difficulty is that the Spanish Government is simply not open to dialogue. When one hears Mariano Rajoy's responses to the problems on the ground, the Spanish Government made its position very clear yesterday. What is needed is not a call for dialogue internally but international mediation and influence to be brought to bear, party to party, such as by the Minister of State's party, on the Popular Party in Spain to address the issue and crucially for the European Union to step in and mediate between the Catalan people and their representatives and the government in Spain. That is the role we want the Government in this jurisdiction to play.

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