Rónán Mullen (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am doing something unusual this morning; I am opposing the Order of Business. I do so because I object to the Government's disgusting habit of constantly proposing, and implementing, the guillotining of legislation in this House. It happened again on Committee Stage of the Affordable Housing Bill on Friday, 4 June. Many amendments were not discussed, including one of mine. We have been promised so often that the guillotine would only be used sparingly, but that is not what is happening. It would be interesting to get the Oireachtas Library and Research Service to examine when this practice of ruthlessly guillotining discussion of legislation started. On that particular day, 4 June, the worst of it was a Committee Stage debate on housing was guillotined to give way to a Private Members' motion on housing from Fianna Fáil Senators on the question of a constitutional right to housing, something specifically excluded from the programme for Government. That sums up the attitude of the three largest political parties to housing. Instead of devoting more time to debating housing legislation, they provide time to allow debate on a toothless motion purely for political grandstanding. It is high time Government Senators stood up to their party leaders and told them to back off. The reputation of the Seanad is destroyed every time this guillotining rule is implemented.

I also raise today the strange attitudes of the Department of Foreign Affairs. On 19 May, the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Deputy Simon Coveney, met the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Iran, which was a friendly meeting by all accounts, complete with elbow bumps. On 1 June, the Minister, Deputy Coveney, visited China and made a very emollient statement afterwards of the kind we have become used to. It was certainly nothing China would object to. The same week the Minister launched a ferocious attack on Israel in the Dáil regarding the conflict there and, just 24 hours after returning from China, he correctly denounced the President of Belarus as having no democratic legitimacy. How can he excoriate Israel one day and have friendly elbow bumps with the foreign minister of a country supplying the rockets Hamas use to attack Israel the next? How can he have friendly meetings with a totalitarian communist government and then accuse Belarus of having no democratic legitimacy? What does it say about the moral underpinning of Irish foreign policy? Have we stopped pretending we base our foreign policy on morality and human rights, instead sacrificing both on the altar of trade links? It is hardly a coincidence that we are trying to expand our exports to China and Iran but have negligible exports to Israel and almost none to Belarus.

I will conclude by referring to a very troubling paragraph I came across in an important book, Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World.It describes how the Chinese People's Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries, CPAFFC, is actually a front for the Chinese Communist Party. In May 2019, the Chinese news agency, Xinhua, reported on the signing of a memorandum of understanding between CPAFFC and a think tank in Ireland, Asia Matters, "to promote people-to-people exchanges and co-operation". According to this report, at the ceremony, Ireland's foreign minister and deputy prime minister, Simon Coveney, said that the deepening relationship would help Ireland reach out to the European Union so as to advance China's interest in the EU. Does that not say it all? We need a debate on China and our Government's attitude to it.