Rónán Mullen (Independent) | Oireachtas source

If somebody writes a letter and says, "Dear Minister, my name is Joe Bloggs and on the blank day of blank, the following happened. Please use this when bringing forward your legislation.", or "Dear Minister, we represent the such and such organisation or we are the blank hospital of the blank region of the country and at a meeting on the blank day of blank, it was recommended that we ask the Minister to bring forward safe access zones legislation", that is my point. The Minister has not given chapter and verse on the evidence case and that has been the strategy all along with this legislation. It is to get complaints that we cannot properly test. It is not clear who is involved, except in one case I know of where there was a named campaigning organisation, and we are invited then to accept all of that as gospel and as evidence that there is something really bad and nasty going on in our country when ordinary people know the reality.

There is a small group of people who express their opposition to abortion from time to time, which they are entitled to do, but the Minister's disingenuous approach is brought out clearly when he attempts to stamp me down for wanting people to be able to be in the face of women in universities. Nobody ever mentioned anybody being in a position to approach anybody, for example, if they were waiting outside the health unit, or anything like that. The case we have put simply, and which the Minister is not honestly addressing, is that in reality, there may be situations where a debate is being organised on a campus and an activist group says it cannot be in a certain place because there is a health facility within 100 m. My point is that type of stuff is not acceptable on a university or a third level campus, not least because that is the very activism that we are seeing on a range of issues internationally on international campuses where debate is closed down. People try to shut down debates, prevent them from happening and prevent the free exchange of ideas. The Minister's answer to that is that it is okay for some lunatic to stand on the bridge at the N11 as though that satisfied his obligation as a Minister in a democratic society to support and defend the free exchange of ideas. Newman's idea of the university is clearly a long way from the Minister's ideas about what should be permissible in a university.

I will accept one point he made which is that there is a possibility that a garda who believes with reasonable cause that a person is engaging in particular conduct can warn them. I accept that as a legitimate response to the question but I note the following. We have seen too much already of the gardaí in this country going up to people and saying, "You cannot really say this, you know". I have no problem, as I said, with public order legislation. In fact, I would like to see it being implemented more in cases of threatening, abusive, insulting and obscene behaviour. However, there was that recent experience of Billboard Chris, the campaigner on Grafton Street, who had a sandwich board on him basically saying that puberty blockers hurt children and should not be allowed. He was quite rightly making the point that we should not be interfering with children's health on the grounds of transgender ideology. He was the one, despite the fact he was uttering a perfectly sane and sensible sentiment and was not picking a fight with anybody, who was approached by a garda. This is the point Senator Keoghan, Senator McDowell, myself and others have been making about the hate speech legislation, which is that it is the process that becomes the punishment.

In regard to the Minister's idea of a solution to this, let us consider a 65-year-old pensioner who has a rosary in her hand. It is not my style of messaging but, you know what, I defend that person's right to engage in that style of messaging. Let us say they are praying silently within 60 m of a door of an institution where abortions are being carried out.The Minister's idea of a democratic society is one where a garda half her age and twice her size can come up to her and say "You need to move on because there are abortions going on there and we have had a complaint from a doctor in that surgery 60 m away. You need to move on now because you are breaking the law." That is how the process becomes the punishment. It is the intimidation and the power of the State, but it is presented as though the act of protest here is an act of the powerful against the powerless. In reality, the powerless are sometimes the people who only have their voice, their placard or even their rosary beads, if that is what they choose, to speak against something that the State is paying for and that the might of the State is behind that all of the oh-so-articulate and highly PR trained Ministers, to a man and woman, impose on us on our television screens and radios. We are asked to believe that it is that person protesting who is the powerful oppressing one, when, in fact, that is the person who represented a minority when it came to the decision to repeal the eighth amendment, although I suspect that there are many people who are horrified at what is happening now and who may very well have voted for repeal. We are asked to believe that is the person who should be nudged on by a garda. Where is the precedent and the parallel for anything like this when it comes to the incursion on free speech in a democratic society?

The Minister has not answered my questions. He has sought to go on the offensive by insulting me and by pretending that I have insulted women. I have insulted no woman. I have strongly criticised the Government and some of the campaigning groups, which I am entitled to do. What I am saying is backed up by evidence of what I know they do. I criticise any person who would deny that people have a right to stand up for the rights of both mother and child, but I do not insult anybody. I used no language of insult, but I used the strongest criticism of the Minister and the Government. I reiterate that the Minister has failed to provide the name of any reputable, objective, credible healthcare-providing organisation. He has failed to provide the name or a quotation from any civil authority.

That is vastly different from what would happen if the Government was seeking to limit free speech in any other area to the extent that it is doing with this legislation. The Minister would be making all sorts of excuses by reference to what various quangos and other bodies were saying and urging upon him, but what we have here is a Government that has been captured by activists. Professor Donal O'Shea and others have said that politicians and the HSE have been captured by activists in the whole area of transgender activism, in particular in terms of self-identification, children and so on, and we are seeing the same capture here. We saw it in the very flawed report on the so-called independent three-year review on abortion, which has been criticised within the health committee recently. We are seeing a classic example here.