Rose Conway Walsh (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I second Senator Victor Boyhan's proposal that the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine be asked to come to the House to discuss the issue of GLAS payments.The GLAS files were submitted to the Department in May and December 2015, but payment is still awaited. I raised this issue in January. It is not acceptable that we are being told at this late stage that the computer is not compatible with the task it needs to perform.

I rise to discuss a matter of which every Senator is aware. Everyone will be disappointed for the family of Pat Finucane following the decision of the Belfast High Court this morning to reject the family's appeal for an international inquiry into his killing. The Finucanes, led by Pat's wife, Geraldine, have been campaigning for the truth about his killing for nearly 30 years. It was one of the starkest examples of collusion between British Crown forces and loyalist paramilitaries. It was a high-profile killing at the time and has remained so for the past 28 years, not just because Pat was a human rights solicitor, but because of the scale of the collusion involved in his killing. Thanks to the determination of the Finucanes and many hundreds of other families, we now know that collusion was a routine and standard method used by the British Government's armed forces to kill hundreds of people.

The court's decision is disgraceful. It is also a reminder of the absence of justice at the heart of the judicial system for those who suffered greatly, and still do, at the hands of the British Crown forces. I urge the Irish Government to continue its efforts to pressurise the British Government to co-operate and set up an inquiry into Pat's killing.

I commend the Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade, Deputy Flanagan, on accepting an invitation to speak at a memorial lecture dedicated to the memory of Pat Finucane this Thursday evening in Belfast.

There will be statements on education in the Chamber today. I wish to raise the case of the Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology, GMIT. Its multidisciplinary Mayo campus is successful and has offered a range of business, technology, construction, nursing, child care and social care programmes to many who would not otherwise have had access to education. It is my firm belief that there has been a sustained and targeted agenda to dilute and diminish the programmes available through the Mayo campus. The strategic neglect of that campus, including delays in decision making around long-term management and programme development, has angered many people in Mayo. It is not acceptable-----