David Norris (Independent) | Oireachtas source

The reason for the lack of business in this House is perfectly clear and it is not the responsibility of this House to deal with the matter. The Taoiseach and the cabal that runs Fine Gael have decided that they will take over the role previously held by Fianna Fáil as the slightly constitutional party. They have decided to destroy the Seanad by refusing to refer legislation to it. Members should watch this space. There will be some changes made in the coming weeks, which I think we can guarantee. We will be looking for the co-operation of everyone in the House in that regard.

I ask the Leader for a debate on the welfare of children in the State. A number of Members have referred to the tragic question of an infant in Cork. The infant might not have survived, but an emergency ambulance should have been available for him. There is also the worrying situation where the welfare of children in counties Carlow and Kilkenny is not protected in terms of protection from abuse. We have the question of Bethany Home where children are being abused. I have been raising the matter for many years and the Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin begged the Government to include in the rescue scheme. If it had been the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, could we imagine such a call being ignored?

However, it was ignored and a programme broadcast last night demonstrated quite clearly there is an utter divergence between the way in which Roman Catholic agencies and Protestant agencies are treated. The Bethany Home should come in. The Sisters of Charity home in Cabra and the Brothers of Charity home in Galway both had fewer criteria than were met by the Bethany Home and yet the latter was excluded, partly as a result of an utterly disgraceful deal done by the former Minister, Michael Woods, which let the clergy off the hook.

Finally, there is an irony about the protest made by Senator MacSharry. I have read the article in question and note a number of Members, including some Members of this House, were apparently mentioned, albeit in not very damaging ways. I, of course, deplore leaks and bad journalism - I am unsure whether this was bad journalism - but these were the very people who, in this Chamber, applauded openly the stings that were perpetrated by the so-called pro-lifers, who I would call anti-choice people, for example, when they went posing as people with crisis pregnancies to the family planning clinics. More recently, people from such groups invaded the clinics of fellow politicians from the other House from the Labour Party, told lies and pretended to have a particular position but secretly recorded the conversations and then fed them to the newspapers. Let us have some integrity in this regard, as well as some consistency. If practices are bad on one side, they are bad on both sides. Let us not have any waffle about the subject.