Seanad debates
Wednesday, 16 October 2024
An tOrd Gnó - Order of Business
10:30 am
Rónán Mullen (Independent) | Oireachtas source
I echo that tribute to the late John Naughten. Like everyone else, I was deeply saddened by the news. I have known the family and his wife, Breda, since our schooldays.I join in expressing sympathy to Mrs. Breda Naughten, Mrs. Kitty Finnerty, to John's children and all the family. May he enjoy an eternal rest now.
I am sorry that I have to oppose today's Order of Business. Here we are again, it seems, with a proposal to guillotine important legislation. We should never be having the guillotine in this House. That is not what the Seanad is supposed to be about. We rightly try to talk up the importance of a second Chamber and then the Government does this to us. I acknowledge the efforts of the Leader in many ways but really, the Government majority should say "no" to the Government on this issue. It should not be happening, particularly on seminal legislation such as we have today, the hate crime legislation. We had a very important Second Stage debate in the Seanad a long time ago which stopped the Government in its tracks. To think the Government's response would be to come in with a rushed debate to push the Bill through today is hard to believe. I acknowledge the Government is pulling in its horns temporarily, at least, de-fanging the Bill to some extent by taking out the incitement to violence or hatred parts. What it should be doing is amending them. It has left in one very big fang, probably at the behest of the Green Party and Deputy Roderic O'Gorman but also NGO elements that have a disproportionate influence on this Government. I refer to a corrupt definition of gender which we have never seen before in legislation, which inappropriately conflates gender on the one hand, which is an objective concept and a binary, male and female, and on the other hand, the subjective idea of gender expression and identity. We could do what has been done in the Criminal Justice (Victims of Crime) Act, 2017, and keep those two categories separate. There is ideology behind this and it is an absolute disgrace.
If we have high-handedness on the Government side, we sadly have secrecy, it seems, on the Sinn Féin side. I for one am taken aback. When we were all told that a colleague was leaving here, they went into radio silence and there was a reference to health so we were all sympathetic. Something more should have been said, that there was a complaint or a matter under investigation which should not be prejudged. I know from experience, and we all know this, that if a priest, for example, has a complaint made against him in a parish, for a long time now the Church will say there has been a complaint and the person has been suspended, without prejudging the issues. That is very harmful and damaging to that person, but it is what is considered best practice when it comes to issues like child protection today. This is not what is happening with the party that tells us it should be the alternative Government. I do not know where people are going to go for people they can trust at the next election. Is it Aontú, Independent Ireland, the centrist Independents? Certainly Government parties and the main Opposition party are not proving themselves to be up-front with people. That needs a response, no matter how well the economy might be going at the moment.
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