Conor McGuinness (Waterford, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome this long-overdue legislation and I commend the team involved in it. It involved a huge amount of work, no doubt interesting but painstaking. It also involved a huge amount of detail. We are grateful for that work having been completed and being presented to us here today.

Having a look through this, I see so many proclamations that refer to activities in my own county of Waterford in the 1840s and 1850s. It struck me that these proclamations - the laws - were, indeed, some of the legal means used to bind our people, to dispossess them, to colonise our land, to colonise our space and to colonise our means of production and to impoverish our people.

What we see here, and particularly in the proclamations, is attempts to criminalise those who were fighting back. I agree with previous speakers who say that, perhaps as part of this process or perhaps at the culmination and the enactment of this legislation, there should be a reckoning by this State. Perhaps it is not the responsibility of this State but, certainly, the opportunity should be taken for the State to say that those crimes that were committed - crimes according to these proclamations but really acts of resistance and acts of survival for our people - should be dispensed with. As these proclamations are repealed, we should repeal the mentality that allowed it to happen.

For any observer looking at Irish society and the revulsion within Irish society at attempts internationally to ride roughshod over human rights norms, at settler colonialism which is at its heart about taking land, heritage and a homeland from people, at the crime of starvation and using starvation as a weapon of war and at the mass incarceration, transportation and clearing of people that is going on - we see it happening in Gaza, the West Bank and in other parts of the world - and who really wants to know why the people of Ireland see that, call it out and will not tolerate it, this is why. It is because this is our history - the history of starvation as a tool to oppress our people and the history of land clearances, of agrarian unrest and of resistance.

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