Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I second the motion put forward by Senator Mullen. I agree with everything he said. Earlier this year, I was privileged to be invited by the Government of Taipei to witness the elections in that country, which were conducted in January. I visited Taipei for the first time then, even though I have always supported the people of Taiwan in their desire to be free and to be free from communist tyranny.

What I found in Taipei was a hard-working, free and democratic society of happy people who had freedom of speech, freedom of conviction, freedom of religion and freedom to go about their business every day as they wished within an orderly, democratic society. What is happening in the province of Xinjiang, as Senator Mullen has so vividly described, is shocking. An entire ethnic national component of greater China is being ground down to nothing in camps which are euphemistically called education and training camps. Not since Arbeit macht freiwas cynically written on the gates of German concentration camps has any set of camps ever been so misdescribed. Every day, the Uyghur people face video surveillance of their streets, confiscation of their passports, complete interdiction of their capacity to communicate with anyone outside of China, arbitrary detention, and so-called re-education, which Dr. David O'Brien, a distinguished academic based at Ruhr-Universität Bochum, has described as totally fraudulent activity as far as its portrayal by official China is concerned.

Millions of people are brought into these camps, where their families are broken up. Children are sent to orphanages, where they are taught to speak Mandarin Chinese. People are re-educated so that their so-called bad tendencies, which usually means the adoption of Uyghur culture, giving their children Uyghur names and exercising their rights to practise their Muslim faith, are educated out of them. These people are shipped around China in trains. They are shipped to be cheap labour for enterprises, as determined by the Beijing Government. These people are subject, as Senator Mullen has said, to a regime which effectively deprives them of the capacity to determine the size of their own families, with some having been subjected to sterilisation, while others have been bullied into abortions.As Senator Mullen has said, the result is that the birth rate in Xinjiang province is collapsing. This is a result of a deliberate policy of the Beijing Government. Senator Mullen was very kind in his reference to the Ceann Comhairle, who wrote not only to Deputies but to Members of both Houses. He laid it on fairly heavily that any association of any kind whatsoever with the Taiwan Government would, in some respects, amount to a serious endangerment of Ireland's policy goals with regard to its relationship with the People's Republic of China. I reject that advice. I believe Senator Mullen is correct. If wolf warrior Chinese diplomats can use economic power to threaten and cajole other people in the world into subjection and silence on these matters, we should be willing to take a stance regardless of any cold winds from Beijing with regard to exports of agricultural produce and the like to that country.

I will not divert too much but it is slightly ironic that people in this country are saying that the economy is not everything - and they are right, it is not everything although it is important - while the Government seems to regard the economy as everything when it comes to Beijing. That is very strange. I presume we sought a seat on the UN Security Council to project our values and to have a voice at the top table of international diplomacy. Having obtained the honour of being on the UN Security Council for a term, we should use our enhanced standing to make it very clear that we condemn outright what the People's Republic of China is doing to its Uyghur minority.

I will make the following point again publicly. When I was in Taiwan, I visited and had conversations with a number of diplomats. Nearly every major state in the European Union has a representative office in Taiwan. Ireland is afraid to establish one. The European Union itself has a representative office in Taipei. I am sorry to inform the House that I learned there that Ireland effectively fights shy of any engagement with that office. It does not use that office or associate with it. It is afraid to be seen to interact with it in the same way other member states feel free to.

If we are to be at all driven by our values in our external relations, we have to be conscious of the huge injustice involving not only cultural genocide, but racial elimination, that is going on in Xinjiang. Although there are not ovens and gas chambers there, there is everything short of them. These people are being deprived of every possible human right. It is therefore a great honour to be invited by Senator Mullen to second his motion. I commend the motion to the House.