Gary Gannon (Dublin Central, Social Democrats)

I thank Aontú for bringing forward the motion today. Listening in to this morning's proceedings, it has been quite an interesting discussion.

The motion includes some worthy measures. I fully stand over extending the voting rights to Irish citizens in the North of Ireland and even having a discussion about how nominations happen is something that we should do consistently but I cannot separate that from the fact that the reason we are discussing this today - it hangs like a spectre over the discussion - is ostensibly because a small number of essentially privileged people did not get to run in the race and, because the system did not work for them, they are now demanding that we change it. We had the best part of 70 years in this country where it was only ever going to be two conservative politicians who would run for President, potentially, one from Fianna Fáil and one from Fine Gael, up until that was broken by Mary Robinson. Now we have a situation where there is a slightly different hue and, because privilege did not get its way, privilege now wants to deconstruct the system.

I listened to Deputy Tóibín's contribution when he was introducing the motion. There were a lot of worthy aspects to the contribution but then it descended into how only Aontú was not part of the establishment. Surely we are better than that. Politics, at present, is quite disillusioning. We have seen that with Fine Gael debasing itself over the weekend. Now we see it here and we are told that only one small party is somehow not part of the establishment. Why exactly is that? Is that because the rest of us got out there early, found a candidate we supported, bought into a vision, and acknowledged that not all of us supported 100% of every ideal that person held but understood the difference between a person who spoke something authentic and somebody who just offered platitudes whereas others simply try to erode trust in the system because they themselves did not benefit from it and then present the fact that opinion polls have shown that 49% of people do not have confidence in either of the candidates reaches the point where some other wealthy people are encouraging others to spoil their votes? The only outcome of that is the spoilt people themselves, who are predominantly privileged, who get to step back and tell us to look at what they did to undermine democratic norms in this country.

We are where we are at this point. I would encourage those of us around the Chamber who, for example, believe in the Irish language, say they speak for social justice and have spoken about Ireland's place in the world as being one of peace to get over themselves for this moment, come out and show a bit of leadership, stand for something that is more than moaning and undermining, and demonstrate the courage of their convictions to stand for something that is beyond the 100% of their own beliefs. That would steer us well.

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