David Norris (Independent)

Continuing on the foreign affairs area, will the Leader arrange for the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Deputy Cowen, to come into the House to explain policy formation in principal areas of Irish foreign policy, following the announcement in the newspaper in recent days that we are giving full diplomatic recognition to the military junta in Burma? This seems extraordinary. We continually hear about the miseries of Aung San Suu Kyi, whom we made a freeman of the city of Dublin. Government is posing as the friend of democracy in this area and now we have this sudden shift. It is very important that, as a matter of principle, the Seanad, as a House of the Oireachtas, is not party to these very dramatic and violent shifts.

I ask for this debate because we have not yet had one, although there is a motion on Tibet on today's Order Paper in the name of the Independent Senators. This is exactly the same issue and it shows that if one does not challenge a situation such as that in Tibet, the whole procedure spreads. In 1959, Frank Aiken said to the United Nations General Assembly that Tibet had been as free and as fully in control of its own affairs as any country in the UN and more than most of them. We co-sponsored three resolutions on its independence in the 1960s——