Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

If blasphemy was worthy of removal from the Constitution on the grounds of vagueness, indecency was certainly not something which could be criminalised on the same basis. I completely agree with Senator Bacik on that point.

I agree with the remarks of the Minister of State regarding the conflation of religion and other political agendas. There is an entity named the National Party which constantly flirts with a toxic mixture of catholicity and reactionary politics which I decry. There are people who ideologically believe that there is a moral international right of migration. It is reasonable to state that economic migration is not to be confused with genuine use of the 1954 convention on refugees. We should be very careful before coming down with hammers and meat cleavers on people who perceive a difference between economic migration and asylum seeking in the strict sense of the term and just dump them all together into one basket. There is a difference. My comments in this regard are-----