Michael McDowell
National University of Ireland · Independent · Ireland
“Then I think of this particular Chamber where people are polite and kind to each other and listen to each other respectfully. There is no baying or shouting down or whatever. It is a great tribute to the Seanad staff that that spirit continues to exist in this House.”
“I note that the whole scheme of the planning Act is that exempt development proposals are considered by the Houses. It is questionable whether this House has really considered the exempt development regulations. Without debate, we sent them off to a committee.”
“I am one of the people who disagrees with the substance of that report. We have to have a real solid debate on it here in this House, not merely a cursory one. It is an issue of fundamental importance. It cannot be avoided, one way or the other. Whatever your views are on it, it needs to be thrashed out.”
“Although coming up to the end of this term we are rushing things through, and the guillotine is well-oiled and slicing this way and that, we have a lot of work to do in the autumn.”
“The people who did that were brought before the International Court of Justice and condemned and imprisoned. If Ireland does not clearly state that there are to be consequences for people who do things like what Mladić, Milošević and Karadžić were brought to account for, if we are incapable as a State of publicly saying that what Secretar…”
“If we cannot, as a State, say publicly to Rubio, "Hands off the International Criminal Court", when they were quite happy when the people who did the 7,000 murders in Srebrenica got their just desserts, but when there is any suggestion that what has happened in Gaza, with 70,000 innocent people killed by aerial bombardment and land bombar…”
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“A much smaller project which will run to Ranelagh, near where I live, is now pencilled in at €9.5 billion and the State more recently has estimated that this €9.5 billion could be of the order of €11.9 billion, close on €12 billion. Two independent bodies, namely, JASPERS and the major projects advisory group, as well as the Committee of Public Accounts, have expressed fears that the MetroLink project could cost up to €20 billion. That is a lot of money in anybody's book. The point I want to make is that it will probably take seven to ten years to be built, no matter what. That is €20 billion over those seven to ten years.”
“I welcome the Minister of State, Deputy Buttimer, to the Chamber and congratulate him on his appointment. I welcome him back to this House to which he has given such great service over the years. I listened to Senator Clifford-Lee speaking about the MetroLink. She made the point, and is possibly correct, that from the point of view of Swords, which is an area in her would-be constituency, it could be transformative. I put on record what has happened to date. To date, we have spent over €300 million planning this project in its various different forms. That is a lot of money. In 2018, the MetroLink was costed at €3 billion and there was to be a 25-station link from Swords to Sandyford.”
“We must be careful, and recent events probably reinforce this view, about language schools offering educational courses but people really using them as a licence to work in Ireland and hold a job with, for example, Deliveroo. There are many jobs which, to be honest, Irish people will not do. We should not be naive, however. Student working rights, such as Irish students had under J1 visa arrangements in America, cause problems for the British Government. With those few reflections, I welcome the Minister and thank him for his kind remarks about the Seanad. I wish him well in the next five years.”
“I wish the Minister well, but I reiterate the point that until he mentioned it here today, I had never heard of this proposal. As far as I know, nobody else in these Houses had ever heard of it either. When I held the Minster's position, we had a briefing session for the justice committee. It was an innovation, prior to going to a Justice and Home Affairs Council meeting, to discuss the upcoming agenda with the justice committee. I prepared greatly for those meetings. If, say, drugs were on the agenda, we just had a discussion on the drugs problems in Dublin. There was no interest from the committee about what was being discussed at the EU level. The possibility of working is mentioned. I do not know how that will go down with either the Labour Party or the Tories in England.”
“Nobody knows what they are cooking up next and the reason we do not know what they are cooking up in Europe is that this House and the other House - the Houses of the Oireachtas - have not properly engaged with the whole European legislative process. Our committees really are not keeping an eye on what is coming down the tracks. They are not analysing what is happening at a European level. They are not doing what used to happen in Britain, where, if there was a proposal for a particular measure, the Home Office would obtain research by British academics as to the implications of the particular proposal. We are not doing any of that. None of that is happening in Ireland. We do not have a mature relationship with the European legislative process.”
“I once attended a committee of the House of Lords to be examined on the issue of certain opt-ins in regard to Schengen matters, and it was like going into an oral examination in Oxford or Cambridge. These peers really knew their stuff and I was lucky to escape without letting myself down intellectually, such was the standard of their analysis. The point I am making is that we are at a loss in Europe due to the absence of the United Kingdom. The Minister mentioned the particular topic that inspired that reflection on his part, which was admissibility of evidence in certain matters. That brings me to one point that I want to make without complicating this evening’s debate. If there is such a proposal there, nobody in these Houses except the Minister knows about it. I am just making that point.”
“The particular thing about attitudes in the United Kingdom towards Brexit is that it is the younger generation that is, in retrospect, the most hostile to the whole Brexit enterprise. I think they instinctively feel it was a mistake to cut themselves off from the European Union. The Minister mentioned attending a Justice and Home Affairs Council meeting and feeling the absence of the UK Ministers there. That is a view I very much endorse and share with him. Many is the time that I was there and I saw that Ireland and the United Kingdom had a unique view which we shared and implemented. We had a number of advantages. We had the advantage that a lot of research was done by the civil service in Britain, which was of huge assistance to us in articulating our points of view.”
“We live in a Trump-Vance world now and it is very difficult to work out precisely how the pressures and policies exerted from America are going to reflect the EU-UK relationship, and how the rise of the Reform Party in Britain is going to change attitudes in the United Kingdom and tie down the Labour Party to a position of conservatism on the subject of youth mobility. On the other hand, if we look at the current situation, opinion poll after opinion poll shows that 58% of voters in the United Kingdom believe that Brexit was a mistake. Working back from that, we cannot say that Brexit is going to be reversed in the foreseeable future. Even the Liberal Democrats, who favour that, are afraid to actually articulate it for want of being described as betrayers of the Brexit referendum. However, I have no doubt that attitudes are changing.”
“As Senator Boyhan just said, the almost allergic reaction of the British establishment to facilitating young people moving across from the European Union countries to the United Kingdom is very difficult to understand. If they really thought that every other country in Europe had the same approach to their young people coming to experience life in Spain, France, Germany or elsewhere, and if they heard people in their parliaments saying that this was absolutely unacceptable, they would pause and think why is this so. It is the migration issue into England that caused so much difficulty for the Tories, when they were in office, and still causes, to an extent, for the Starmer Labour Government. I have no doubt that attitudes are changing in the United Kingdom.”
“I congratulate the Leas-Chathaoirleach on her appointment. Although I had no hand, act or part in it, nothing gives me greater pleasure than to see her where she is at the moment. I welcome the Minister as a colleague and a friend, and as a person in whom I have the greatest confidence that his period as Minister will be effective and carried out with tremendous skill, and also that he will bring the public with him in the difficult task he has. As he said, this particular motion has no downside. We are simply giving Ireland the right to be in on the negotiation process for a scheme which, depending on its content, we largely have for ourselves in any event. There are a number of points that I want to make.”
“For that reason, although I see the merits of both candidates in this election, for my part I am not going to participate in this election as a mark of my rejection of the cynicism that has led us to select our officers in this way, despite all the flowery commitments given on 1 February 2018 in respect of it being the last occasion on which the officers of this House were going to be elected in this way.”
“We could, if the promises made to us had been kept, even in the tiniest degree, have had the right to make our private decision as to which of these people was the appropriate person to elect. We could have made a private, secret decision on their merits or demerits as we saw them individually, but that was taken away from us by a cynical process of abandoning every commitment to reform this House. We are, therefore, unlike Dáil Éireann, in a position where we have to decide on this matter subject to the party Whip via public vote and in a process that is wholly unacceptable. It does not happen in Westminster, it does not happen in Dáil Éireann and it was not going to happen here, only for the fact that Leo Varadkar broke his word to this House. I just want to put all that on the record.”
“I regret to say that standing order came before the Committee on Procedure and Privileges of this House and was, without explanation, simply cast aside. Nobody even gave a reason it should not happen. It was simply swept aside at that meeting. A motion was put down by the Seanad Independent Group to amend Standing Orders before the last general election to bring it about in this House. Again, it was just voted down by the Government parties - the Green Party, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil - at the time without any real explanation. At this stage, that being the case, we have two excellent candidates before us in Senators Byrne and Flynn. They are very good candidates with their own merits. Doubtless, there could have been others as well.”
“One of the things Leo Varadkar came into this House and said he wanted to bring about was that there would be a secret ballot among Members when the positions of Cathaoirleach and Leas-Chathaoirleach came to be decided, as is the case in Dáil Éireann. He promised that on that occasion. On foot of that, a number of us worked, with the assistance of the staff of the House, to craft an elaborate standing order in the English and Irish languages dealing with this issue and to put in place a system whereby every Member of this House, when it comes to choosing its officers, could choose freely and away from the party Whip and Government and caucus decisions whether she or he believed one or other candidate, or one of a number of candidates, was the correct person to be elected to those offices.”
“Two motions are being discussed before the House but if one is taken, the likelihood is the other will not be taken. That structure is forced upon us by what happened in this House approximately six months ago. Members of this House, particularly the newer Members, should know that on St. Brigid's Day 2018, Leo Varadkar came in here and promised us a vast raft of reforms. Every single one of those reforms he abandoned and betrayed. None of them have happened at all, not even, as the Cathaoirleach will know, the one in relation to the European Union statutory instruments. It has collapsed, for the time being at any rate, due to the attitude taken by the Government and its legal adviser.”
“President Trump seems to suffer either from invincible ignorance or incorrigible dishonesty in the way he is dealing with them. He demands half of their mineral resources, and then when he is refused that, he accuses them of starting this war. I ask the Leader to go back to where we were a couple years ago when the invasion of Ukraine started, wholesale, and have an all-party debate in this House with the Minister present, where we can pass an all-party motion supporting the principles that Ireland supports, supporting the decent people of Ukraine and making it clear that the people in this democracy will not be bullied by international piracy to give up on our fundamental principles.”
“On this occasion, I wish to mention Ivan Farmer, a distinguished member of our staff who is about to leave us and go to Brussels for an important position. I wish to put on the record my group’s deep gratitude to him for all the work he has done for this House over the past five years. I raise the point that the south aspect of this House is, at night-time, adorned in the national colours of Ukraine. Senator Frances Black mentioned the occupied territories Bill. The occupied territories Bill was moved originally in 2018 at a time when it applied to certain parts of eastern Ukraine and the West Bank in particular. It was not and is not a reaction to Gaza. The principle that underlies it is the same. Regarding what has been happening over the past few days, the people of Ukraine should not be abandoned by the western democracies.”
“If the tea leaves are to be believed, however, he had healthy competition from very fine candidates and that means that all the more congratulations are due to him for being elected in the face of such fine competition.”
“With those few words I want to reiterate my congratulations to the Cathaoirleach. I fully endorse what Senator Higgins said about his track record in terms of reform and what he said about the statutory instruments being scrutinised before they become law and, indeed, the failure of the Houses of the Oireachtas to take seriously at all the process of engagement with the European Parliament legislative process, which, unfortunately, is practically zero in this day and age. We can do more. We can contribute more to the formulation of laws for our country. I will make a final remark. We do not know the process whereby Senator Daly became the agreed candidate to be nominated for the position of Cathaoirleach today; we can only read the tea leaves.”
“It seems the time has come for all Members of this House to understand there are those who look to people like me and the rest of us and ask why we are here and what is so special about us such that they do not have a vote in the same way as university graduates do. I hope that people will take it not in any sense as devaluing their election. I know how difficult it is to be elected to this House under the present system. Sometimes it is more difficult to be elected indirectly than it is directly. However, I hope those people who have been lucky enough to be indirectly elected to this House will see that the case for reform has never been as strong as it is now, especially since the higher education franchise is to be extended to probably up to one million people.”
“It is not that I in any sense dismiss or devalue the indirect process whereby county councillors, Members of the Dáil and outgoing Members of the Seanad have a say in the composition of this House, but the Manning report and the Seanad Reform Implementation Group both came up with what I consider to be a reasonable compromise, namely that a majority of the Members of this House would be elected by a one-person, one-vote system, whereas a minority would be elected by members of local authorities and Members of the Oireachtas. Maurice Manning, a former Senator, TD and president of the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission, devised that formula within the terms of the Constitution. It does not require a referendum to implement it.”
“It seems the logic of what the Cathaoirleach has said about the importance of popular participation in the democratic process means we cannot aspire to having this House re-elected time and again on the basis that two thirds or three quarters of the citizens of the State are excluded from the democratic process while a smaller fraction, perhaps up to a million in the end, get to vote because they have had the privilege of higher education. For that reason, I reiterate, at the beginning of this session, my absolute determination to keep to the fore the process of reform of how Members of this House are elected.”
“That minor reform of the way in which one tenth of the membership of this House is elected is a step forward, but there is, as the Cathaoirleach mentioned in his few words, the important point that, as in democracies across the world, ordinary citizens, regardless of whether they have a university degree or have been privileged to have participated in higher education, should have the same right and entitlement to a say in the composition of this House as graduates of third level institutions.”
“Ar son na gComhaltaí Neamhspleácha sa Teach seo, is mian liom comhghairdeas a bhronnadh ort, a Chathaoirligh, tar éis duit a bheith tofa mar Chathaoirleach arís. The Cathaoirleach mentioned in his few words a number of things that go to the heart of our function in this House. One of them is being part of the democratic function of the State. It is the case that the process of reform is slowly taking place on this occasion. The two constituencies that I, Deputy Higgins and four other Senators represent will no longer be in place and we will have a new system for electing representatives from the graduates of Irish institutions of higher education and the universities.”