Tom Clonan (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I commend the work Senator McDowell has done on this issue. As a newcomer to these Houses, I was shocked to learn that the library in its current form was to be dispensed with. I have always had access to a library as an academic. What is a library?A library is the most powerful engine for arriving at the truth, with data, evidence, facts and nuance. As parliamentarians, we are synthesisers of culture, the economy and public policy. To do that without an evidence base is to operate blindly. In the history of the Republic, we have had periods of intellectual and ethical failure, the most recent being during the years of the Celtic tiger and the subsequent catastrophic crash, the impact and reverberations from which are still being experienced and endured by our people. As a consequence, according to the Edelman trust barometer, politicians and journalists are the least trusted professionals in Irish society. In order to restore and build on that trust, we have to come forward with evidence-based policies and legislation. Where does one find that evidence? In the library.

I will also speak to what Senators McDowell and Boyhan said about the library staff. Librarians are not the cataloguers of information. They are senior civil servants and public servants with postgraduate qualifications who are experts in the gatekeeping and management of information. This House is obsessed with misinformation, disinformation and the threats and challenges posed by artificial intelligence. Here we have a cohort of professionals in the Houses whose expertise resides in that area of methodological and systematic approaches to telling what is misinformation or disinformation and having evidence-based, factual approaches to what we do.

What happens in the libraries is often subversive. I have had my own experience as a researcher, exploring what constitutes best practice, for example, in the international military with regard to the deployment of female personnel and benchmarking that against our own armed forces. We find that the library allows us to make a contribution to knowledge that transforms that organisation for the better.

Senator McDowell talked about the taking up of the floorboards. That is an act of wanton vandalism, but to remove the library as a resource for parliamentarians is an act of sabotage. It is an act of collective self-harm if we, as TDs and Senators, allow this to take place by being passive and, by omission, allowing it to proceed. It should not happen. It should be stopped. We would be the only national assembly in Europe, as Senator McDowell pointed out, that would not have a library service. That would make us a laughing stock of Europe and the world. I did a brief search using the library resources and found that in every national parliament beyond Europe, in Istanbul, Ankara, Australia and Washington, these are the primary national library services of those states and republics. If we were to allow ours to just be disbanded, it would not only be an act of collective self-harm, but it would also be extremely disrespectful to our colleagues who work there and are part of the fabric of this community.

I support Senator McDowell's motion. I thank him for the work he has done on this. I reiterate how shocked I was to learn that this invaluable, critical support was to be taken away. We are entering a challenging period with regard to misinformation and disinformation. It is vital, to avoid the ethical and intellectual failures of the past, that everything we do is evidence-based. One will only find that with the Socratic method and Aristotelian method, through dialogue with our library staff. If they are off-site or if some penny-pinching, cost-cutting mandarin puts them into an online format, that vital, human engagement will not take place. We cannot rely on algorithms and search engines to provide the existential moral agency that we require as a Parliament. I fully endorse the motion. This is a pressing issue, and not just for us in this House, because the decisions we make here are of critical importance to this Republic. It is in everybody's interests that we resist and fully restore the reading room and Library and Research Service to these Houses.