David Norris (Independent)

I welcome the Minister to the House. I also welcome the fact that he is the Minister in this position. I have known him for a long time and I regard him as a good friend. We have had many conversations about cultural matters. Long before he was Minister, he had a good track record in being active as an Opposition Deputy, not just as a good Kerryman but concerning all artistic, cultural and literary events throughout the country. I salute him on his record. It is not a case of someone parachuted into a Ministry who knows nothing about the background of the subject. We will support the Minister and he needs support because a number of institutions are being threatened.

Let us start on a positive note. The Minister asked for suggestions and I will repeat one I made during the presidential campaign. It was a revolution of poets. I might not have agreed with everything they said or did but we now have a poet and a visionary as President. I suggested that one of the things we might consider doing for the celebrations in 2016 was to invite the leaders of France and the United States of America to come and join with us to read the Proclamation of 1916 under the great portico of the GPO and read their own foundation documents, which we drew from in our visionary Proclamation of 1916. I want them to go one step further. All three leaders could then commit themselves to cherish not just all of the children of the nation equally but all of the children of the planet equally because we are so interconnected.

I shall return to the negative. I listened with interest to what Senator Labhrás Ó Murchú said. I was around in 1966 and remember it very well. It was a deeply unpleasant experience for people like me and, I would say, it was for a majority of Church of Ireland people and for anyone who had any connections with the southern Unionist community which had been under attack since the foundation of the State. To me it was nothing other than a tribal celebration of bloodlust from which I was excluded on every possible ground, except the fact that I was white. I was the same colour as everybody else but I did not have the same sexual orientation. I did not have a republican background. My father was English like Pádraig Pearse although he conveniently forgot that. Unless anybody thinks this is an ignorant condemnation of Pearse I have read his An ClaíomhSolais and it is full of the greatest racist pap one could possibly come across. Arthur Griffith was not a whole lot better with his anti-semitism. Let us be realistic. I was delighted to hear the Minister talk about inclusion. Let us learn from the mistakes of 1966. Let us make the celebration genuinely inclusive. I salute Senator McAleese for what he said. He and his wife have played a pivotal role in bringing different people together. I have never had a huge amount of time for the Orange Order but I was delighted to hear him say that its leader should be invited to the House. Let us give him a welcome. I was even more delighted to hear that the Leader of the House supports his call so there is no contest. We will have them here. Good. It shows that we will have an inclusive celebration and that is important.

The question of language was touched on and it is important. I also wish to say that the editorial section in The Irish Times yesterday was a complete disgrace to the newspaper. I do not know who wrote it because all of them are usually anonymous. Whoever he or she was should cut out the article and eat it. In the last paragraph it stated "the monarchy ..... also jars with our sense of modernity and democratic values". Preening ourselves in our adolescent, juvenile way on our superiority to the British, it continued "it provides spurious continuing legitimacy to the inherited privilege that continues to dominate both economic and political life in the UK". What about this country? I know all about where I live. I am privileged to be living in an area of grotesque under-privilege in the north inner city. The writer continued: "Of course, our neighbour, in truth a democracy, though still recovering psychologically from the loss of empire, must be free to entertain its cherished delusions." How extraordinarily generous but how disgusting in its smugness? Let us avoid this kind of claptrap.

With regard to the celebrations, I hope that the Unionists and the British will be included. We are all of the same people. Ryan Tubridy showed the Queen around Dublin and started the tour from the top of the Guinness tower. He is a direct descendant of Edward III, a King of England, as people will know from a television programme while she is a direct descendant of Brian Boru and Hugh O'Neill, the rebel Earl of Tyrone so let us recognise the complexity of history. I also salute John Redmond. But for the First World War, and that is a big "but", he might have achieved the same degree of independence for this country that was achieved by 1916 thus avoiding a lot of mess.

The Minister went on to mention all of our cultural institutions, local authorities, or all that will be left, unless we give him the strong support that he deserves and needs. I share the concerns of other people about what will happen to them. First, we have lost our sovereignty and that is not much to celebrate. In my opinion we should have a day of mourning for the surrender of our sovereignty. If we are going to destroy our cultural institutions it will equate to the bombing of the Custom House in 1922 that resulted in the loss of all records stored there. I applaud Senator Bacik, as the leader of the Labour Party and a significant member of Government, for taking the opportunity to raise questions about these institutions. That took a certain amount of political courage and I salute her.

Cultural Ireland has been left adrift. Half a dozen institutions do not have directors such as Cultural Ireland, the National Archives and the National Museum of Ireland. Where are the directors? Has an arm's length principle been adopted? Senator Bacik requested a vote but where is it? We talked about Michael D. Higgins, our President, who introduced the 1997 Act. Why are we setting about dismantling it? I found it to be a quite extraordinary measure and it will be a great shame if it damages the institutions. It is notable, and I think it has been said already, that Professor Diarmaid Ferriter resigned in protest. He had no political agenda but he resigned in protest because he saw what was happening to our cultural institutions. If legislation is put in place to dismantle and replace the 1997 Act we will have disgraced ourselves.

With regard to the mergers, under a previous Government attempts were made to dismantle and close the James Joyce Centre by an alleged merger. The Minister will know it very well because he was a great supporter of the centre. I managed to fight it and I got rid of the people who were behind it as well. We started off with a promise of shared back office services but that is fine if that is as far as it goes. Nobody in the world of culture has set their face against economies.

I want to pay tribute to Senator Mac Conghail and the Minister's party leader and Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, who appointed people of vision to the House. They are people with connections to the arts, poetry, drama and the Abbey Theatre. Plato, and I dare to continue to mention his name, banished all of the artists in his republic, the poets and the rest, because he said that they were unreliable and asked questions. Of course they do and that is their value. That is why they exist and that is why they strengthen the spiritual life of the country. We should glory in the Abbey Theatre and W.B. Yeats. I am delighted that a Yeats Day in Sligo will be announced. The organisers probably got a hint from Bloomsday.