Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I join in and identify with the remarks made by my colleagues about the debt we owe to the staff of the Houses of the Oireachtas, the Clerk's office and the other services that keep us going. I wish to express my gratitude for the politeness, courtesy and solid support those offices have given the Members of this House. I speak on my own behalf and that of my colleagues in the Independent Group.

I wish to move an amendment to the Order of Business, which is to take the motion in my name and my colleagues' names, No. 91, motion 2, on the Order Paper immediately after No.1 without debate. The motion states, "That Seanad Éireann notes the publication of the judgement of the Uyghur Tribunal on 9th December, 2021 and accepts its findings.” I have taken the unusual step - I do not do this normally - of circulating the report of the Uighur tribunal, which was established in London and sat for a considerable length of time assessing what has been done to the Uighur people and set out in detail the colossal litany of cultural and physical genocide, enslavement, sterilisation, transportation and dehumanisation that is taking place in Xinjiang province as a result of the activities of the Chinese Communist Party. I wish to draw the House's attention to the report because its findings are shocking. It concludes with a quote from a woman who was in the camp, which reads:

“In the ‘transformation-through-education’ camps, life and death do not mean the same thing as they do elsewhere. A hundred times over I thought, when the footfalls of guards woke us in the night, that our time had come to be executed. When a hand viciously pushed clippers across my skull, and other hands snatched away the tufts of hair that fell on my shoulders, I shut my eyes, blurred with tears, thinking my end was near, that I was being readied for the scaffold, the electric chair, drowning. Death lurked in every corner. When the nurses grabbed my arm to ‘vaccinate’ me, I thought they were poisoning me. In reality, they were sterilising us. That was when I understood the method of the camps, the strategy being implemented: not to kill us in cold blood, but to make us slowly disappear. So slowly that no one would notice.”

That is what is going on right now in China, and it is about time that the Members of this House and the members of democratic assemblies right across the world stood up and told the Chinese communist Government that we abhor what it is doing, we stand by its victims and we will not tolerate it.