David Norris (Independent)

I take great pleasure in welcoming Dr. Robinson back to the House. We were fellow scholars many years ago in Trinity College and I have followed her career with the greatest of admiration, as it evolved from membership of Dublin City Council to the Seanad to Aras an Uachtaráin and the Office of the UN High Commission for Human Rights. She then worked on a group that initially was supposed to consider ethical globalisation but I gather that was regarded as a bit of a mouthful and it became Realizing Rights. The notion that financial globalisation should be unaccompanied by the development of an ethical system to support and regulate it would be disastrous and I applaud her for taking this initiative but perhaps she was correct to change the name to Realizing Rights. The principles that have underlain her career support the pursuit of human rights and dignity not just theoretically but in action.

I would like Dr. Robinson to comment on the question of population because it seems that the extraordinary expansion in population in my lifetime - the global population was 3 billion when I did my intermediate certificate and it has now reached 7 billion - is having a huge impact on resources, the environment, political tensions and relations between nations and it also raises economic issues. Previous speakers obliquely referred to the situation that obtains in this House and generally throughout the world where human rights considerations are ruthlessly driven off the agenda by the priorities associated with the economic difficulties the entire planet is facing. Does she have any comment on that? I believe they are all interconnected.

Will she comment on the status of gay people and organisations throughout the world? I acknowledge one or two respected international organisations have received accreditation at bodies such as the UN but we still have the situation where in Uganda right wing Christian groups have almost succeeded in introducing the death penalty for consensual relations. There was an appalling incident, of which I am sure Dr. Robinson is aware, where two young men were hanged from the back of a lorry in Iran simply for the crime of private expression of their love for each other.