Rónán Mullen (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I have followed the progress of this Bill carefully through the House, mainly from my office. I am anxious to put on record my support for the Bill and my opposition to the amendments proposed.I have followed much of the debate from my office and I have found it very interesting and revealing. Thanks to the operation of the Irish Constitution and the intervention of the courts in their decisions we have a sensible Bill which seeks to reconcile competing aims to do with the rights of employers and those who have funded schools to promote their vision about life and the meaning about life and reality, which is fundamental to the educational enterprise. I speak as somebody who sits on the board of CEIST, an organisation which is a trustee for more than 100 voluntary secondary schools in the country, which do very great work and respect diversity in how they operate and admit. This competes with legitimate individual aspirations. In every workplace, and not just in educational or health facilities, there may be tension between peoples' legitimate desire to express themselves fully and be themselves fully, and the right of the organisation employing them to promote ideas which are central to its sense of what is good and true and fundamental in life.

What is good about the Bill is it requires objective standards for decisions to be made. It is clear from what the Minister of State said that he would like to go in a very different direction to what the Bill actually does. He takes credit for what he sees the Bill as achieving. I support what the Bill achieves. What it achieves is an insistence that any action taken be objectively justified by a legitimate aim and that the means of achieving the aim would always be appropriate and necessary. This is the nub of it. No reasonable person could ever argue with the establishment of a standard like this.

I have noticed in debates of this kind an easy recourse to a false dichotomy. We are presented with the alternative of a world where the State decides what values we must all have and what values may be legitimately communicated, the communication of which being a requirement for State funding-----