David Norris (Independent)

I move:

That Seanad Éireann, in the light of:

the abolition of the Combat Poverty Agency;

the destruction of the Equality Authority;

the downsizing of the Irish Human Rights Commission;

the absorption of the National Consultative Committee on Racism and Interculturalism;

as well as the refusal to advocate the monitoring of the human rights protocols attached to the external trade agreement between Israel and the EU;

the abandonment of the people of Tibet in the interests of trade;

the historic collaboration with the Bush Administration in the rendition programme;

calls upon the Government to strongly and publicly affirm its commitment to human rights and to the individual exercise of those rights both domestically and internationally.

I welcome the Minister of State at the Department of Foreign Affairs, Deputy Peter Power, to the House. While the principal focus of the motion is on areas that concern the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform, I am sure the Minister of State will transmit this information to his colleagues.

This is a time of severe economic strain and some may wonder why in this environment, instead of taking an issue related to our finances, I have chosen instead to address human rights. I have done so precisely because of the current situation. In an economic blizzard such as we are facing, it is all too easy for human rights to be blown off the public agenda. This tragically seems to be happening here in Ireland. Moreover, just as the al-Qaeda attacks on the United States were used as a cover for the comprehensive undermining of human rights in that country, here there is a parallel danger that our economic and budgetary difficulties may serve as a camouflage for the deliberate dismantling of the various human rights organs of the State which act as a fundamental safeguard for ordinary citizens.

Over recent months there has been what can only be described as a series of systematic attacks by the Government on virtually all State organisations engaged in the area of human rights. This appears to be an attempt to muzzle or drown out the voices of the disadvantaged at the very time when they most need to be heard. It is only by allowing these voices to be heard that we can come together as a community to address the very difficult times in which we live. Organisations under siege include the Combat Poverty Agency, the National Consultative Committee on Racism and Interculturalism, the Equality Authority and the Irish Human Rights Commission. That the economic arguments employed to justify these measures do not stack up was bravely placed on the record by a Member on the Government side in this House during a debate some weeks ago. The excuse of financial stringency has been exposed as absurd and self-contradictory.

The Government, however, by keeping the brand name alive while destroying the substance, pretends these organisations have in some sense survived abolition, absorption, financial castration and forced decentralisation. The mere ghost existence of such groups is a fig leaf concealing the sinister reality that not one of them is now in a position realistically to vindicate the rights of citizens. There is no point whatever in citizens allegedly having rights if they are discouraged or prevented from exercising them. That is, most unfortunately, the state which we have deliberately created in Ireland and collaborated with at international level.

In an Adjournment debate on 18 November 2008, I made a strong case for the retention and strengthening of the Combat Poverty Agency, the Equality Authority and the Irish Human Rights Commission. Events have moved on since that debate. We have had the honourable resignation of Niall Crowley, chief executive of the Equality Authority, on the grounds that the Government's action rendered the authority ineffective. The chair of the board significantly declined to support her chief executive and those other members of the board who attempted to resist the Government attack. There has been another series of resignations since. On 19 January this year, the ICTU representatives, Louise O'Donnell and David Joyce, both resigned. They had stayed on to see what could be rescued from the debris. In her resignation letter, Ms. O'Donnell said that she was "greatly concerned about the direction the chair is taking" and stated that the chair "had clearly indicated that she wishes to diminish the role of professionals within the organisation and to move away from its role as an advocate for those who cannot represent themselves".

The downsizing of both staff and budget appears to be having a catastrophic effect on the capacity of the authority to fulfil its mandate. Reductions in staff numbers, replacement of key personnel by persons inexperienced in the area of human rights as well as the farcical insistence on decentralisation has, according to board members, "led to a huge loss in corporate memory". It is, in addition, very disquieting, despite all the talk of economic necessity, that the Government in July 2008 added in by nomination an extra four members of the board at a cost of €40,000 per annum. This appeared to be done to load the vote on the board in the Government's interest.

This is not good governance and the situation must be addressed urgently. The chair of the Equality Authority should resign immediately, having signally failed to protect the interests of her own organisation and presided over the resignation of the chief executive and now up to half the board. I publicly call upon her today to do so. In addition, the tattered remnants of the serving board should also pack up their kit and salvage what little dignity they have left. Like the ancient Israelites, they are being commanded to make bricks without straw. We are not living in the middle kingdom of ancient Egypt. We are in a 21st century European democracy and they should land this task, which has been deliberately made impossible, back in the lap of the Government. The fraudulence of the Government's pretended commitment to human rights should be publicly exposed.

One of the reasons for the Government's attitude appears to be that the preponderance of issues taken up by these groups involves criticism of services provided by Government agencies. Historically, we have a good and proud Civil Service establishment but it is only human to resent what may be perceived as incessant criticism. However, it is the responsibility of Government to resist this tendency. Unfortunately, the Government has fostered this climate of resistance, denial and spiteful payback. Just as there has been shown to be a golden circle in our financial establishment, so it seems there is a brass circle in our bureaucratic establishment that is only too happy to incite or collaborate with Government in the undermining of agencies perceived to be critical of the State.

I am astonished at the docile response of the trade union leadership and I call upon them at this late stage to make the restoration of Government support for human rights agencies a major plank of their negotiations concerning social partnership. Indeed, it seems as if all the agencies I have mentioned in my motion are being targeted precisely because of their independence and an attempt is being made to remove their professional capacity. Almost 70% of the Equality Authority case files, for example, involved allegations of discrimination against public sector service providers. However, rather than reinforce the work of the Equality Authority to secure necessary change, eliminate discrimination and promote equality in key areas such as the provision of health services, education and housing, the Government has chosen to kill off the Equality Authority completely.

This is not new. I have on several occasions before in this House instanced the appalling example in which the Equality Tribunal upheld a case of discrimination against a transport company for not extending the same travel rights to a gay couple which were automatically granted to heterosexual couples, whether married or not. Instead of acting to rectify this situation, the Government intervened legislatively to copperfasten the discrimination by redefining the word "spouse" specifically to exclude gay couples from the rights to which the very Equality Tribunal established by Government decided they were entitled. This resulted in the only European legislation with which I am familiar which actively introduced discrimination in this area.

We have equality legislation on the Statute Book but this is vitiated by the exemption of the churches from the equality legislation. They continue to be entitled, despite their deplorable record in terms of child molestation, to terminate the employment of teachers in jobs that are paid out of the tax dollars of citizens merely because of their sexual orientation. Once again, we have legislation in place that is marred by obvious lacunae.

The establishment of the Irish Human Rights Commission was trumpeted by Government as a move of European-wide significance and as part of the agreement between the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland Governments to ensure human rights developed on both sides of the Border in directly parallel ways. Nevertheless, even before these cuts the Northern Ireland equivalent was significantly better resourced and financed. Now the IHRC is left to struggle desperately but honourably to accomplish its remit in circumstances that make such an achievement almost impossible.

Turning to the international context, there has been our ignoble acquiescence in the Iraq war. I think I can say that I have been consistent in this matter. I spoke out for human rights in Iraq over many years against the Saddam Hussein regime and I opposed the naked barbarity of the war on Iraq launched by George Bush. The Government, in defiance of the wish of the people clearly expressed in mass demonstrations, adopted a position of queasy equivocation. All over the world people protested while governments did nothing. Had the United States of America been persuaded against this action, we might not have had the tragedy in Gaza. The two military assaults have certain clear, significant similarities in the exclusion of the press, the mass attacks on centres of civilian population and the use of white phosphorus in highly questionable circumstances. Most incredibly, the leader of the free world, the United States of America, assented to the horrors of kidnapping and torture, first denying and then attempting to justify and legislate for these moral aberrations.

Once again, Ireland acquiesced and, more than that, refused to confront the manifestation of this evil on our own soil in the form of aircraft which were used in the unbroken circuit of rendition being refuelled on a number of occasions at Shannon Airport. Response to questioning in the Oireachtas was shifty and dishonest. Spokespersons from the Minister down refused to answer clear questions, instead answering questions of their own confection. Time and again we were told that there was no evidence that prisoners in shackles were being taken through Shannon Airport, although even this proved to be untrue in one curious case. Never was the central question, the refuelling at Shannon of American aeroplanes whose only known purpose was rendition, addressed.

The committee of inquiry of this House, which was in the process of being established with all-party support to determine the facts in an impartial manner, was shamefully disbanded at the instigation of elements within the Government. Official Ireland accepted bland assurances, that had no legal value or basis, from Ms Condoleezza Rice that the USA did not engage in torture. What else is water boarding, drowning and medical resuscitation of victims but torture? Even the USA legal establishment has now belatedly come to acknowledge this, and in recent weeks a judge of the American military tribunals has dismissed charges against a Guantanamo inmate on the basis that he was subjected to torture. The President of the USA, Mr. Barack Obama, has openly spoken about having to dismantle the apparatus of torture after the demise of the discredited Bush regime.

In the Middle East, Washington has so far played a malign role. Under the cloak and protection of the Bush administration's guilty practices, Israeli authorities felt enabled to launch a blitzkrieg against the already suffocating population of Gaza. The European Union had paved the way for this by refusing to accept the democratically expressed will of the people of Gaza in electing a Hamas-led Government while simultaneously preaching the virtues of democracy. The EU cut off all sources of finance to the beleaguered people. In recent years, I have repeatedly tabled motions requesting that the human rights conditions of the Euromed partnership, especially Article 2 of the external association agreement between Israel and the European Union which places as an essential element the respect for human rights and democratic principles, should be examined. This was a mild step, but it was not adopted nor was it even advocated by Ireland.

In the war on Gaza there is now ample prima facie evidence of war crimes committed by the Israeli forces. As with the USA in Iraq, reporters were excluded, civilian areas were intensively bombed and civilian schools and medical facilities were targeted. Even UN facilities, the co-ordinates of which were repeatedly made known to the Israeli military, were subject to attack. Chemical materials of an extremely dangerous nature such as white phosphorus were extensively used. There is some lenience in international law for the use of white phosphorus but merely as a masking agent to create a smokescreen for troop movement. Its use against humans, either soldiers or civilians, is expressly forbidden in densely populated areas. Any use of white phosphorus in a place such as Gaza is bound to cause civilian casualties. Almost the whole of Gaza is, in fact, a built-up area in which 1.5 million people live crammed into a place about the size of greater Dublin. In the enormous ghetto that is Gaza, there is simply nowhere for a civilian population to escape.

There is ample evidence of families rushing desperately from one refuge to another before finally being wiped out like rats in a trap. Mr. Christopher Cobb-Smith, an acknowledged weapons expert who was in Gaza as part of an Amnesty International fact finding team stated, "We saw streets and alleyways littered with evidence of the use of white phosphorus, including still burning wedges and the remnants of the shells and canisters fired by the Israeli army."

The reports speak further of the inevitable endangering of civilians. In one case recorded on 21 January, Ms Abu Halima, matriarch of a farming family in Beit Lahiya, was caught in an inferno that burnt her husband and four of her nine children to death. Her own evidence stated:

Fire came streaming from the bodies of my husband and my children. The children were screaming fire, fire and there was smoke everywhere and a horrible suffocating smell. My fourteen year old cried out I am going to die I want to pray. I saw my daughter-in-law melt away.

Even an Israeli who was a part of the Amnesty investigation, Ms Donatella Rovera, stated in an interview: "We do not know why they used them, but we do know that it could constitute a war crime."

New weapons are being used including dense inert metal explosive, DIME, munitions. These may cause a small wound to the individual initially. Then having insidiously entered the body it operates with extraordinary and devastating impact on the internal organs. According to the Norwegian doctor, Mads Gilbert, who worked in Gaza in the Shifa Hospital:

There is a new generation of very powerful small explosives. There is a very strong suspicion I think that Gaza is now being used as a test laboratory for new weapons.

Italian scientists in a new weapons research committee have said in a statement: "Evidence is mounting of DIME munitions wounds that may be untreatable due to the incorporation of metals such as tungsten." I have more information on this matter which I will provide later on.

Once again, the United States of America is supplying these materials of death and destruction and Ireland may be implicated. Immediately prior to the first use of white phosphorus by the Israelis in Gaza, a USA military plane, a C-130 Hercules, No. 92-0552, with unusual cargo handling modifications landed at Shannon. This plane is based at Little Rock air force base in Arkansas, USA, almost beside the Pine Bluff Arsenal white phosphorus facility, the only active producer of white phosphorus for the USA military. As in the case of rendition, we cannot conclusively say whether this plane was carrying white phosphorus or whether, as a result, we have criminal involvement in the perpetration of the horror of Gaza.

However, I am pleased that the Minister for Foreign Affairs supported the call, along with Cyprus, Sweden and Portugal, for the establishment of a war crimes inquiry. Opposition to this very reasonable move was led by Germany, prompting the question why the unfortunate Palestinians should have to pay for the guilty conscience of Germans. I urge the Minister to continue discussions with those countries that supported the call for an international war crimes investigation with a view to getting some accountability for civilian victims of the war.

Of course, there were Israeli victims too, although the numbers were very small, with casualties running in the region of 100 Palestinians to one Israeli, and three of the 13 Israelis who died did so as a result of so-called friendly fire. There were rockets fired by Hamas. This is wrong and regrettable. However, was it never to fight back? Its country was economically strangled, civilians and military personnel assassinated by remote control, any attempt at exports smothered and fishing boats shelled. What were the people there to do? Perish passively and slowly or move into intolerable subjection? One is reminded of the rhetorical question of the O'Casey character who asked, when confronted by the allegation that Irish republican irregulars were not playing fair, "Do they want us to come out in our pelts and throw stones at them?" Indeed, pathetically in many instances, as we know, this was to all intents the extent of the military response by the Palestinian population.

The Palestinian people are left isolated and unprotected. Protestations of Arab solidarity are an insulting nonsense. At the instigation of the Fatah authorities in Ramallah, the Egyptians refused to allow international medical teams to enter Gaza during the conflict through the Rafa crossing point. According to newspaper reports they used gas against Palestinians caught in the network of underground supply tunnels running between Egypt and Gaza. Most horribly of all, they are still refusing to permit the exit of seriously wounded children who require urgent treatment in European hospitals. Still we do not even attempt to monitor the implementation of human rights protocols attached to significant international treaties. Once again, an empty formal gesture to human rights exists on paper while the actual exercise of these provisions remains deliberately and cynically dormant.

In this context, I welcome very much a new motion passed by the Joint Committee on European Affairs on 15 January 2009. The first was proposed by Deputies Michael Mulcahy and Timmy Dooley of Fianna Fáil concerning possible breach of Article 2 of the EU-Israel Euromed agreement in light of the action in Gaza, and the other, proposed by Deputy Joe Costello of the Labour Party, was a composite motion concerning both the Euromed agreement and the matter of possible war crimes.

The attitude of the Government is now changing as it slowly wheels itself into line with the view of the new Administration of Mr. Barack Obama in Washington. Nevertheless, economic interests dominate even now. That is why there is little formal hope of Irish engagement on the issue of the continuing question of Tibet and the Chinese colonising forces. As we speak there is a forceful crackdown by the Chinese military on the people of Tibet, especially in Lhasa. Our position regarding the historic independence of Tibet has been shifted insidiously, but meticulously, despite protests from honourable members of the Government in recent years and without any debate on the issue or any reference to either House of the Oireachtas. Effectively, the human rights of the citizens of Tibet have been abandoned in the interests of trade. This debate in the Seanad coincides almost exactly with the 50th anniversary of the escape of the Dalai Lama from Lhasa to northern India. The Chinese, with characteristic cultural sadism, have declared a new holiday marking that anniversary, allegedly to celebrate what they call the liberation of the people of Tibet. Those of us in Europe, mindful of the gigantic economic power of the People's Republic of China, utter not a squeak.

There are reports that the Government may move to cut back our commitment to overseas development aid. This is despite the fact that we announced our intention to achieve the target of 0.7% of gross national product in the coming year or two. I believe this would be a very regrettable step, especially since our contribution is calculated not as a gross sum but as a percentage. The actual cost to the Exchequer will decline automatically in parallel with the contraction of our economy. I will conclude my remarks at the end of the debate.