Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I understand, to an extent, the desire to believe we have friends in both the east and the west, given how revolting the political classes in control of Britain are at the moment. There is no doubt that Boris Johnson and the Tories have used the Brexit debate to stoke up xenophobia and anti-migrant racism within a wider project of using the withdrawal from the EU to position a declining British capitalism as a low-wage, low-regulation haven for the worst forms of neoliberal projects. There is an accompanying attack on all public services, the NHS being a shining example. It is also clear that the Tories want to be free of environmental laws and regulations and to position themselves as a low-wage, anti-worker and anti-environmental competitor of both the EU and other trading blocs. I see the Minister of State nodding. He agrees with me on that.

This debate and the 21 separate sections of the Bill highlight just how intricate and complex having a border on this island is. James Connolly rightly predicted "a carnival of reaction both North and South" because of partition. In the South, we are only in recent decades reversing some elements of that reaction in the legacy of the mother and baby homes scandal and much of the anti-women legislation that the southern State embedded in itself. The same fight continues against that reaction in the North through the campaigns for the right to choose and marriage equality. However, the strongest legacy of the reaction of partition today is the DUP. This is not just a conservative right-wing outcrop of the Tories. It would, by any standards of politics, be classified as extremely right-wing in every policy sphere. That type of politics has been sustained over decades only by a recourse to sectarianism and outright bigotry based on religion. The consequence of its strength as the largest party in the North has been abysmal for both communities. Protestant workers have paid dearly for the dominance of a sectarian far-right party as their primary representative through public services, wage rates, social services, social protection and so on.

In this Covid crisis we can see dramatically just how high a price workers pay when led by extreme right-wing and sectarian forces. The willful ignoring of public health advice by the DUP is based on a political philosophy that is marginalised in most jurisdictions, but we see it play out clearly in Trump's America, in Johnson's UK and with the DUP in Stormont. It is, when stripped of its rhetoric, a decision that economic interests must come before public health and that if the consequences of that decision are large death tolls and huge infection rates, then so be it. It is not a policy of living with Covid but of learning to die with Covid, with the added insult that these people claim that this is somehow the will of God. In this disaster, the rational case for a united Ireland becomes ever clearer in light of the Covid crisis.

As Deputy O'Callaghan noted, we need to remind ourselves that the people of Northern Ireland did not vote for Brexit. A practical case is to be made for an all-Ireland health service and an all-Ireland approach to the pandemic. The need for a united Ireland is no longer a question of which flag flies over which jurisdiction but a question of whether we can truly build a national health service for everyone on this island, or ensure a safe environment with access to decent services, decent pensions and decent wages for everyone on this island. We cannot continue to shy away from the need for a border poll forever.

Many of us are extremely concerned about the question of an all-Ireland health strategy. Anyone who has listened to GPs and healthcare workers in the North pleading for the government there to listen to public health advice can tell that the discussions are falling well short of where they need to be. The Tánaiste told us earlier that the Government is in continuous discussions with the First Minister and deputy First Minister, but we do not know what fruit is coming out of those discussions. All we can see is disaster hurtling our way. We need to know where those discussions are going and what sort of input we can have into an all-island strategy to crush this pandemic. The Stormont parties, especially Sinn Féin, need to be stronger and must spell out very clearly what the public health advice is and how they want to take measures to follow it. I will leave it at that. I do not have much to say about the 21 individual measures in this Bill. They are obviously necessary if we see the world in terms of who runs what part of the country but it is quite a disaster for this country that we remain partitioned and live, as Connolly predicted, "in a carnival of reaction".

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