Joe O'Reilly (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank and congratulate Senator Michael McDowell for bringing forward this issue. It is his vigilance that has brought it to our attention, and it is typical of him that he would be concerned about such an issue. We are grateful to him for this. He has done an important service tonight. This cannot go under the radar.

I happen to have the privilege of working alongside in this House Mary O'Connor, who comes from one of the most illustrious literary families in this country, as you would know, a Leas-Chathaoirligh, being from Kerry. She is from the famous Keane family of Kerry. She said to me earlier today: "Surely you are going up to speak in the Chamber about taking away the library." She said it would be a shocking thing that in a house of parliament, a national parliament, we would be without a library on the campus. She said it would be unthinkable. That is a view from somebody on the staff there. I would say it is a widely shared view among the staff. It is an interesting thing to bring to bear on the debate and it comes from somebody who has the credentials to speak on matters like this.

Aesthetically, the room, as it was, was beautiful. It was a beautifully done room, beautifully decorated, very relaxing and very pleasant. It was one of the nicest rooms in the buildings and in any building I know. What is proposed is shocking. Senator McDowell described it better than I can, but it has been essentially desecrated, at the risk of bringing in religious terminology. It has been made into a shambles of a setup, compared with what it was. It was a very beautiful room. We have a picture of the room in its original condition. It is just so beautiful and should not, as a protected structure and otherwise, be touched.

Personally, I really enjoyed using the library and research facility. I found the library staff extraordinarily pleasant to visit and extraordinarily helpful. You could go into the room and chat and they would help you. I would then often follow that up with a phone call. They would prepare pieces for important issues, do research, etc., and were all highly professional and qualified. They are not going away, in a sense, but if they are off campus, off centre, not in the building, that personal access that used to be will diminish, and that is a great pity. As Senator Chambers said, it is an unthinkable concept that one would have a national parliament without a reading room, research facilities or such staff available.

Senator McDowell made a very good point in his excellent presentation of the issue because he has clearly thought it through and researched it. He drew our attention to the horrendous cost. I think he said it was something in the region of €570,000. I am not sure of the figures but they are on the record. Apart from the cost, however, Senator McDowell makes the practical point that we could use this Chamber when it would not be in normal use for committees or whatever else. In fact, it has been used and is used occasionally for other reasons. There is nothing to prevent that. There is nothing to prevent using a number of other buildings around the place and showing a bit of practicality and adaptation to facilitate that.

I have great regard for the great depth of thought of my colleague, Senator Kyne, but I am not totally in agreement with him. While it is a lovely concept and we enjoy the idea of the late-night theatre, there may be a basis and there is a case for having a family-friendly Parliament, but having a family-friendly Parliament does not dictate removing the reading room downstairs. We should do something about the hours. Things can be done about that. As the proposer of the motion said earlier, we can look at the Mondays and the Fridays and look at earlier starts. There are many options there. We could look at the use of a number of rooms etc. All those options are there to achieve the family-friendly dimension. There is a case for that as we are to have wider gender equality and a more inclusive Parliament. I get the point made by Senator Kyne that there is something lovely in the theatre of late-night sittings and the cut and thrust that goes with all that, and occasionally that takes place, but I do think we have to look at the family-friendly parliament concept and advance it. It is not implicit in that, however, that the room would be removed.

There is something almost slightly barbaric about this. Not to fully compare it to this, but it is like when the hordes came to destroy ancient Greece and Rome. It is wrong to remove things that are aesthetically beautiful and it would be wrong to remove this facility. I have not discussed this with any of the people who advanced the concept, but I assume that one of the arguments is that the room does not get used that much. That is not, however, a reason not to have it. We should encourage more use of it and try to have Standing Orders and a procedural situation here that would dictate people researching more and using it more. If there is deficit or a lack of use, the solution to that is not the room's removal; it is to increase its use. I did not get to use it that often - none of us gets to do these things as often as we would like - but the number of times I did, I used to find it really relaxing to go in and sit there and just unwind. It is a very therapeutic exercise in its own right, if it is only to look at a newspaper or whatever. Then, as Senator Boyhan said, we have access to the professional people in there. Senator McDowell made a point earlier about the regional press. It is important we would have the regional press readily available to all of us. It is important that the local newspapers of Cavan and Kerry, a Leas-Chathaoirligh, and such places are right here and that people can, in discussing any legislation, see its impacts locally and see what is important to people at the local level.

All in all, I strongly support the motion on a personal level, but it is also the view of my group, well articulated by our main spokesman on the issue here, Senator Kyne, that we support strongly the motion proposed by Senator McDowell. I support the arguments he made and the subsequent arguments of Senators Boyhan and Kyne. Essentially, what we are saying is that an aesthetically beautiful room and protected structure, as a physical entity, should not be interfered with but should be left intact. Then the living reality within it of people going in to relax and read is very important and very valuable. The third thing is the professional access, that is, the access to researchers and librarians within it. It is hardly the best signal to send out about our Parliament that we would be removing reading rooms. It might feed into some people's pretty cynical narrative about the place, and we do not want to do that.