Tom Clonan
University of Dublin · Independent · Ireland
“It is appalling; you could not make it up. However, as this is a very grave and dark thing, they raised these concerns by way of protected disclosures in February 2025. Here we are, 18 months later, and no action has been properly taken. Those protected disclosures have not been processed about a child safety issue.”
“I thank the Senator. The Adult Safeguarding Strategy Bill that I hope to introduce fills the gap that exists in Irish legislation around adult safeguarding for our elderly citizens and for all of us who at some point in life will need care. This Bill is consistent with what the Government has set out in the programme for Government.”
“They told me one of them was informed of a child sexual assault or the potential for one - even a rape of a child - and under the guidelines, this requires mandatory reporting, so they set about reporting it to An Garda Síochána and Tusla.”
“A woman came into the clinic and expressed concerns - and I am sorry to use this language here - that she had discovered her spouse - her husband - was accessing child pornography images and films through his devices. These are crime scenes. This is the sexual abuse and rape of children.”
“This should be dealt with with energy and urgency, because all this talk about process is not child-centred. It is administration-centred and it is a classic HSE tactic to cover up, deny and delay grave matters. I want to know why this particular manager is pushing back on mandatory reporting of child sexual abuse.”
“I thank the Minister of State for reading out the statement on behalf of the Minister, Deputy MacNeill. None of these remarks are directed personally at the Minister of State, but to be honest, ChatGPT could have written that response. In it, the Minister, Deputy MacNeill says she and the HSE cannot comment on individual cases.”
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“At the height of that battle, the state of the art in terms of command, control and communication meant that when they were at their absolute maximum capacity, commanders could make maybe three or four real time, meaningful battlefield decisions in any 24 hours, at the level of division and above. It was about four decisions per day. Fast forward to the 21st century, thinking of operations such as the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, with changes in technology, logistics, supply, communications, digital communications and so on, they were able to increase that to maybe 24 to 30 decisions per day. With the use of AI and target acquisitions systems like Palantir and others, during the recent air campaign against Iran, the Israelis and the United States were able to perform up to 1,000 battlefield decisions per day.”
“It is great to see the Minister of State here today. It is the first time I have seen her since her elevation. I congratulate her on her appointment and wish her the best of luck with her portfolio. I thank the Civil Engagement Group for bringing forward this legislation. It comes at a timely moment. We know about automation in weapons systems. There were radical changes in the automation of weapons systems during the 20th century and that has continued into the 21st century. However, the concept of an autonomous weapons system is an entirely new one that would take human beings completely out of the decision-making process. By way of illustration, during the D-Day invasion and subsequent invasion of Germany and liberation of France in the Second World War, it was the very first time we had these combined arms operations.”
“I know there is a tiny minority of voices who question why we should put the rainbow colours around the Houses of the Oireachtas. I am delighted to see it because I remember the time when it was hidden. It was stigmatised. It was something that, thankfully, people like David Norris fought so hard to bring out of the framing of it being a criminal act. In celebrating where we are in relation to AIDS, we should not link the two things together too clumsily but we should celebrate our LGBTIQ community and all of our brothers and sisters.”
“A very close member of my family is a medical doctor. She was stabbed with an infected needle in the emergency department in St. James's Hospital in the early 1990s. We went through a period of waiting for the tests to come back to see whether she had she been infected. I understand the fear at that time before there were proper treatments. It was a uniquely cruel disease for those who contracted it because they could see in their own community what was happening and they had watched their friends with the appalling symptoms of sarcoma and struggling for breath. It was a very tough disease. I want to conclude by saying that I came in this morning and passed by the front of Agriculture House. I saw the rainbow flags up there.”
“I grew up on Ballygall Avenue and he lived in Finglas Park around the corner. We used to play kerbs with footballs outside our houses. He was in London that summer of 1985 and he never came home. He passed away and none of us knew, again, because of that appalling stigma attached to it. The fact is that AIDS can be treated now. I pay tribute to all the people who work with antiretroviral drugs and deal with the community. I want to say this. I remember at the time when this was dominating all the major news platforms, there was a distinction drawn between people who were gay and then people who were infected through blood transfusions or who were haemophiliacs or whatever. There was kind of a hierarchy of suffering and more, if you like, recognition was given to people from outside the LGBTQI community.”
“When I was working in New York, I met friends from school and from Finglas, some of whom were able to come out because it was a different environment and they could live an authentic, valid life. In 1987, Prince released the song "Sign o' the Times", which begins "In France, a skinny man died of a big disease". We began to hear of AIDS as a phenomenon. I remember the advertisements on Channel 4 and BBC that had pictures of cliffs crumbling and collapsing down into the sea. We did not really understand the threat, particularly in Ireland because of the intersectional stigma around being gay, which was to engage in what were described in the laws as "homosexual acts"; these were criminal offences. Therefore, we had this awful situation where people who were getting ill could not come out. One of my friends was named Patrick.”
“I thank the Minister for coming to the House. I welcome our guests to the Visitors Gallery. When I saw this on the schedule, I decided to come along and speak to the issue of AIDS. Sadly, I will be 60 in August. I did my leaving certificate in 1984. That summer, and in 1985, all of my friends and I went to London, as young guys from Finglas. We went on the ferry and took the train down. I remember it stopped in Rugby at about 3 a.m. and some eejit got off the train and wandered off into the night. That summer, we all began to discover ourselves. Over that summer and the summer of 1986, two of my friends came out. They were able to do that in London in a way they could not in Ireland. In 1986, I went to New York on a J1 visa.”
“That is between €25,000 and €28,000 a year in extra costs such as medical costs, equipment, extra heating and transport. In total, the disability allowance is less than half of that. We need to have a non-means-tested universal payment of disability allowance. While I welcome the discussion at government level on introducing a cost-of-disability payment, these are not hidden costs. They are quantified. What is not quantified is the moral distress, suffering, fear and anxiety that disabled person experience every day unnecessarily. According to one of the contributors this morning - a beautiful young man who is disabled with an honour's degree in history and a first-class master's degree - he experiences structural penalties on a daily basis. That is evidence of an ableist state.”
“I raise the issue of the cost-of-living crisis. Earlier, I attended a meeting of the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Disability Matters. Again, we had disabled citizens in tears describing their abject living conditions and the enduring and grinding poverty that they are forced to live in in this country. We are outliers in the European sense in that throughout the European Union, the disability allowance as we know it is disaggregated or not connected to income. It is a non-means-tested universal payment. We means-test. This year, the ESRI released figures for the cost of disability. This is not the cost of buying clothes or paying for groceries, rent or heating. This is before a person puts their hand in their pocket. The actual extra cost of having a disability of Ireland is between €488 and €550 per week.”
“The parents have provided me with a great deal of extensive and lengthy briefings. They have set out every law from the Equal Status Act to the Equality Act and the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which we are in breach of, contrary to the letter and spirit of the convention. At the moment there is no pathway of treatment for these children through the Health Service Executive CDNT model. To get the intensive speech therapy these children need, their only shot is to get it by means of these special classes. I ask the Minister of State explicitly in the 60 seconds he has, whether he he undertake to take out those three words, "of unknown origin". They are explicitly discriminatory. Will his office please respond to the parents in Loughrea?”
“That is not a rights-based response and that comes from the Minister. We are here to serve the people. I have a mandate to raise these issues. The Minister of State has a mandate; I know him personally as the former Chair of the Joint Committee on Disability Matters. I know exactly how he feels about these matters. This formula of words based on an SLD of "unknown origin" has to be taken out of the circular. The needs of these little citizens need to be met. To become non-verbal is a needless, preventable and catastrophic outcome for these children and their families.”
“Human speech is the most powerful instrument we have, the human voice, to mobilise personal power, socialise and be included. To allow children to allow children to become non-verbal, 20 little citizens - the parents tell me in their engagement with other parents' groups, there is a similar number of children in every CDNT in this position. The Minister gave a response to them in August 2025 said that the boards of management of schools are permitted to enrol students who do not meet the prescribed criteria but have an SLD diagnosis to fill any remaining places in these classes, which includes children with Down's syndrome. I find that statement grotesque because it means ah sure look, if there are any places left over we will slot one of your children in, a child with Down's syndrome.”
“What really struck me in my meeting with the parents in Loughrea was their moral distress at the fact that they had brought this to the attention of the Minister, Deputy Naughton, met her, and the former Minister of State, Senator Rabbitte, and they had agreed a pilot scheme would be run in CDNT 8 in Loughrea. The gold standard internationally for children with Down's syndrome, for example, is that they receive four intensive speech therapy sessions per week over two years based on the principle of motor-based learning. If they get that intervention, they become verbal. There are 20 children affected in this way in CDNT 8. For want of the deployment of one speech therapist, these children are likely to become non-verbal.”
“I thank the Minister of State for coming here. I appreciate that the line Minister is here. I express my appreciation for the Minister of State coming to hear me out. I travelled to Loughrea and met the parents of children with Down's syndrome. They are listening in now as we speak and watching this. There is a formula of words in Circular 0024/2025 under "Criteria for Enrolment" in paragraphs (1)(b) and 2(a). As criteria for acceptance in these special classes, they must have a delayed language disorder or a speech sound disorder of "unknown origin". That de facto excludes children with disabilities that are known, for example, Down's syndrome. It is a rather perverse form of words because it excludes children who absolutely need this intensive speech therapy to become verbal.”
“Will the Minister of State clarify that for me? I understand that people providing fewer than four are exempt from the regulations, but will the Minister of State guarantee that they will, notwithstanding that, be allowed to receive State funding to provide the very valuable services they do? I thank the Minister of State for his patience on that.”
“Would the HSE be able to say that it is not giving funding for that service provider because they are not amenable to regulation, and that it would be irresponsible of it to release public funds to a carer in that situation? That is something that I really need to get an answer on because if that were the case, that would then confine all of us to using a model we do not want. For example, most recently when funding was cleared for supports for my adult son, his preference was to go with the care provider that had been given to him through the higher education thing for going to university. In our CHO the HSE just said that we could not do that. We had to take the company it suggested or nothing. For fear of losing the funding, we just had to accept it. The company has been fine but it is not the service of his choosing.”
“They are all capricious. They all have their own little kingdoms and their own little rules. I have had people say to me, "You are not getting that funding". When I ask why they say, "Because I say so", and because we do not have a legal right to any of these things, it is very hard to push past that. Under the brokerage model of care provision, with a company like Home Instead, a client gets to pick and choose their carers who then come in and provide a service. However, they would not come under the definition of the Bill because they would likely be dealing with just two or three clients. Would this legislation give the HSE-----”
“For-profit care providers - I am not going to name them because I do not want there to be a suggested or implied criticism of them - can be hit and miss. Also, because they keep a certain amount of the money they take from the HSE for themselves, those carers tend to be paid very little. What happens all the time with our son is that he gets a wonderful carer and they really gel, but because they are only getting paid €12 or €13 an hour, they inevitably get a better offer of work and they say, "I am really sorry, but I have to move on" and so that continuity is denied. In all of those years, there has been a very unequal power relationship between families and the HSE. I am not talking about the carers, but the HSE itself and the people who open the funding gates. Across all of the regional health areas, they are all different.”
“I will give the House some context. My family has been receiving a number of care hours from the HSE for a very long time now, maybe ten or 12 years, and to echo what Senator Tully said, the experience is mixed. I also echo what Senator Costello said that without exception, the people who come into our home from all over the world are the most wonderful people, but it is the model of the provision that can sometimes lead to inconsistencies. For example, we had one service provider where we never knew from one day to the other whether somebody would turn up, and it was rarely the same person. The carers then would not understand my son's care needs and I would have to come down. It was just very stressful. That is one thing.”
“The Minister of State is very welcome, as are the Department's officials. I hope they will be able to address my concerns in the time provided. I echo what Senator Stephenson said. I have a concern about section 69B(2)(a) which states, "the person provides a home support service to fewer than 4 persons". Senator Stephenson quite correctly pointed out a concern about whether an unscrupulous operator could get a pile of smaller care providers, limit them to three clients and in that way try to evade regulation. That is a concern. The suggestion in that amendment is that an operator is deemed exempt from the regulator if they only provide care to that number of people. I do not know if the Minister of State or the Department's officials can answer this for me, but I am very worried about this clause for a different reason.”
“I do not think there is an intervention for him, but when I think of those 200 families where there is an intervention, if there is something we can do together in this House as a collective, I ask that we push for the recognition of Skyclarys.”
“It is not an easy disease to deal with. Skyclarys shows great promise in halting the progression of the disease and giving people extended quality of life and life itself. I will mention a former colleague of mine, journalist Niamh Ní Hoireabhaird, who has a piece in the Irish Independent today. She is in the process of having her voice banked because she is losing her voice as a journalist and a recently married lady. She is now using a wheelchair. While she still has a voice, I ask that we listen to her and have Skyclarys approved. My own family is also experiencing this. My son's voice is being banked.”
“Not every time. Come on. I think Christmas Eve, no? Anyway, mar a deirtear as Gaeilge, cogann na faoileáin, ach cagann siad ar an gcloch chéanna. I commend the collegiality of this House and, in that spirit, I congratulate Senator Costello from Fianna Fáil on the great work she has done on having givinostat approved as a drug for people suffering from Duchenne's muscular dystrophy. In that same spirit, I ask, please, that similar action be taken in relation to Skyclarys, the drug that supports people with Friedreich's ataxia. We have 200 young people, and they are mostly young people, in the Republic who are suffering from Friedreich's ataxia, which is a progressive disease that leads to the deterioration of the neurological and muscular systems. As I have said before, the sufferer struggles for breath.”
“When I turn on the Flightradar24 app on my phone and look at the air traffic corridor over us, I am conscious that those weapons are passing through our airspace with our consent and us making a financial contribution to it and that is completely at odds with our neutral status. At a recent session in this Chamber, the Minister of State had a great argument. He said, "No, they do not", and I had to point out to him that he is completely and utterly out of depth. As for the situational awareness on the part of this Government in relation to the Middle East and the export of alumina to Russia, I am going to say that it is unwilling to acknowledge it, as opposed to unable to, but I ask the Government to think about this, reflect on it and please support this Bill.”
“It goes by rapid response airlift through our airspace, and we are paying under EUROCONTROL the navigation charges for those things. If this Bill is progressed and enacted, we could at least purge ourselves of the moral responsibility for the slaughter of innocent Lebanese civilians. Again, people may talk about hearsay, I have witnessed this. I know there are some people in Government who do not like people speaking to their lived experience but, how and ever, I shall continue to do so. High explosives cause limb separation, decapitation, the pulping of internal organs and the shattering of bones of small children and elderly people. That is not hyperbole. That is the reality on the ground. If someone sees it, they will never forget it.”
“Imagine, the Irish taxpayer is making a material contribution of over €10 million to send cluster munitions and other weapons to be used in Lebanon as part of the ethnic cleansing south of the Litani river. Those weapons are being used in proximity to Irish troops. The Guardian reported that cluster munitions have been found in the little villages and wadis around the Irish positions. What other country would ask its taxpayer to make a financial contribution to weapons fired at its own troops, that is, our young men and women out there; the best of us? At the moment, the United States provides 78% of all Israeli weapons and munitions and since 7 October 2023, there has been a spike in that delivery of up to $12 billion per year. Where does it transit through?”
“Further to that, I was subpoenaed to the trial of Mick Wallace and Clare Daly in Ennis District Court after they breached the airport boundary, and I gave evidence to the effect that there are weapons on board and that evidence was accepted by the judge. For anybody here who suggests that this is an overstatement or hearsay, I can tell them that I have seen it. The other issue I have is not just what is on the ground but what is passing through our airspace. There has been a huge increase in the volume of US military air traffic through our controlled airspace since 7 October 2023 and in the past few years the Irish taxpayer has paid over €10 million to AirNav Ireland to pay for the onward transit of these aircraft to the Middle East which are ferrying munitions to Israel.”
“The aircraft was full of weapons. In fact, the cabin crew said welcome to Shannon and asked people to please leave smaller weapons in the overhead bin and larger weapons under the seat in front of them and to please not carry weapons or ammunition into Shannon Airport duty free. That was in the newspaper. It was published in The Irish Times . It is free to download. People do not need to have a subscription to The Irish Times . If people put in "Tom Clonan", "Shannon", "weapons" and "Irish Times", they will get the full article. Let me be clear, weapons do transit through Shannon on aircraft that do not have sovereign immunity, and which can be searched, but for the fact there is an unwillingness to do so on the part of the Government and its agencies.”
“In 2005, as The Irish Times ' security analyst, I got the opportunity to interview US troops in Shannon and, as I have said here previously, journalists do not get permission to do that from Shannon Airport. They get it from the US State Department. It has a permanent military liaison officer in Shannon. At the time I was there, he was at the rank of lieutenant colonel. I have his mobile phone number if the Minister of State wants to call him or her and ask them what they are doing here. One of the civilian aircraft that is chartered by the United States Government from airlines like Omni Air International and others landed while I was there, and I asked if could go on board and see the troops arriving in Shannon. When the door opened, I went up the steps with a photographer from The Irish Times and went in.”
“The Minister of State is welcome to the House. Fáilte isteach. I commend Senator Stephenson and the Cross-Party Group on bringing forward this Bill. I am disappointed with the position that the Government has taken. I know that the Minister of State is not the line Minister, and that he is here to read out the Government's position, so I do not mean any personal slight to him whatsoever. I know him to be a person of the highest integrity. Like me, as a family man, I know the Minister of State is as horrified as we are by what is transiting through our airspace. I want to give a little bit of context. Are weapons of war being brought through Shannon Airport for use in the Middle East and elsewhere? They are.”
“Yesterday I spoke about security and defence issues and I watched the response to my contribution. I have never queried the professional or service record of any Member of the House. I have never brought into question their credibility, standing or validity. This is a vocational House and I bring my expertise here in good faith and everything I say is evidence-based. I would hope that going forward in future contributions the subject and the ball is dealt with and not the man.”
“No, they did not. What difference does the Stephen Ogilvie attack have? I will tell you what the difference is. It is sectarian, racist, identity-based politics, that narrative, that rhetoric of hatred mobilised by various privileged people to get their foot soldiers to go out and attack the vulnerable on our streets. It is Kristallnacht, wash, rinse, repeat. Destroying a Turkish barber? We have to confront this as politicians and we must take a stand against this type of appalling rhetoric. The only common denominator in most of these assaults is that they are perpetrated by men. Should we ban all men from the streets? Certainly we should not discriminate on the basis of ethnicity or skin colour. We are all capable of the same potential violence.”
“Do I suspect every Dublin person of being likely to carry out savage and brutal acts of violence? No, I do not. In relation to the alleged perpetrator in the attack on Stephen Ogilvie, do I suspect every Sudanese person or every Somali citizen of such violence? No, I do not. In fact, they come to my home daily and weekly to attend to the intimate care needs of my adult son, and I welcome them into my home as my brothers and sisters. We have to be very careful about what is unfolding at the moment on this island North and South and across the water in the UK. When Natalie McNally was murdered by Stephen McCullagh in the most brutal fashion and her head left at a dog bowl in Northern Ireland, which has the highest level of violence against women in Europe, did people come out on the streets and burn cars? Did they set fire to buses?”
“I condemn the violence perpetrated on Stephen Ogilvie in Belfast in recent days, when he was almost decapitated by an alleged perpetrator who is now before the courts. I also condemn the murders of 23 Catholics and Protestants who similarly had their throats cut, were attacked by axes, mutilated, tortured and in some cases subsequently shot by people such as Lenny Murphy and John Murphy. Do I suspect every loyalist or member of the unionist community of being so violent? No, I do not. Most of them are fine, decent and upstanding people. I also condemn the murder of Keane Mulready-Woods, a child who was dismembered, decapitated and mutilated, and parts of his body were disposed around the city. The alleged perpetrator in that case, who has been shot dead, was from Dublin like myself.”
“On a point of order, that is not what I said and I ask the Minister of State to withdraw that remark. Apologies, I should be standing. It is not what I said. I am not calling for a 1916 rising. As a former member of Óglaigh na hÉireann, that is the last thing I would do. I ask the Minister of State to retract-----”
“I would query why anyone would not support or would reject these amendments. I thank the Acting Chairperson for his patience.”
“We must be careful to keep the record of this House correct. I certainly never called for another 1916 Rising. What I am saying is that we must have a republic that serves the interests of its citizens. Amendments Nos. 4, 5 and 6, as set out, seek to do that. I cannot understand why any Government of this Republic would oppose or not support those amendments for all of the reasons I have set out. We have to draw a distinction between what the Government does not like to hear and what it thinks is relevant or irrelevant. Disagreement is a good thing. We must remember that this Government is here to serve the people. It is not in charge. It does not govern. This is a republic. The Government is here to serve all of us. These amendments reinforce that concept of service to the people and the need to protect the people.”
“That is not the Republic I remember from the 1970s and 1980s, notwithstanding all the challenges we had. My grandmother fought in the War of Independence. If she were to read this, she would have a lot to say. There might be a citizens' assembly, like there was in 1916 on O'Connell Street. Our children have been sold out by this generation. We are supposed to be generation X but I would call us generation F, for "fail". Think of everything that our grandparents built up. My father, as a garda, was able to live in the community that he policed and was able to send five of his children to university. He did all of that on a garda's wage. Could a garda do that now?”
“On the one hand, it declared our sovereignty to be inviolable and stated that we cannot compel people to give evidence that would contribute to the public good in terms of contributing to knowledge over the Omagh bombing, the largest massacre in the history of the Troubles. It cannot do that but, you know what, like it did with the troika and austerity, the Government is quite happy to reject these amendments so that international capital and international liberal economic market forces can further strip money from what should be a wealthy republic but in actual fact is one where if you are trying to start a family, trying to build, get or buy a house or trying to make all of those decisions to self-actualise as a citizen, or if you are sick or elderly, you are in big trouble.”
“He has never had speech therapy or occupational therapy or any of those things in a meaningful sense. As a consequence, his life is significantly limited. As a parent watching that, it causes moral distress and injury. When the then Minister, Paschal Donohoe, was in the House for statements on the financial forecast for Ireland, it was interesting that when I made those points to him, he got visibly angry. He said that I had no idea how difficult it was to make those types of decisions around austerity. What he said to me was, "It hurts us more than it hurts you." I ask the Minister of State to understand that the spirit and motivation of the people in this House putting down these amendments is to protect our collective interests. We remember how the Government has behaved in the past.”
“If you want to buy a two-bedroom apartment, you have to be in the top 1% of earners in the European Union. Here are amendments that ask the State to indemnify our citizens at this point against the risk of exposure to interventions from outside our jurisdiction because we have learned that international debt can be socialised and levied on the Irish taxpayer by a Government that imposed austerity as though it were a virtue. I will say that I do not think that anybody in Fianna Fáil intended for the crash to happen. It was misadventure. However, the policies of austerity were premeditated and carefully calculated to inflict pain on the most vulnerable people in our society. In my family, our disabled son lost all of his services. He has never had physiotherapy in a meaningful sense.”
“The rest of them went to Australia, Canada and New Zealand, where our kids are going now, because they offered them a life. My point about this is that the neoliberal economic agenda is writ large ideologically and philosophically within this document. That position has been endorsed, reinforced, carried out and executed by the Government since 2011, when a Taoiseach was appointed who promised us new politics and a fair deal. What has been the cumulative effect of that? In my lived experience, it means that my 25-year-old, my 24-year-old, my 22-year-old and my 18-year-old have no prospect of owning a home of their own. If you want to buy a one-bedroom apartment in Dublin, you have to be in the top 10% of earners in the European Union.”
“I remember in Finglas seeing the prefabricated houses being transported along Ballygall Road East to Ballygall and Finglas village and out into Finglas west and Finglas south. In a State that was not a member of the European Union and had no access to European funding or foreign direct investment as we have now, and as one of the poorest countries in Europe, our grandparents felt that social housing was a social good and not a commodity or something to speculate on. We joined the European Union. We had the Jack Charlton years. I remember the mass emigration of the eighties. I did my leaving cert in 1984. My youngest fellow is doing his today. He just completed his biology exam. By Christmas of 1984, only three of my class were left in Ireland.”
“Amendment No. 4 states: In page 4, to delete lines 14 to 19 and substitute the following: “(3) For the avoidance of doubt, it is hereby declared that an award made by a body empowered to make awards pursuant to an international agreement to which this section applies is not, and never was, enforceable in the State if enforcing the award would ... As I know everybody in the House can read, I will not continue to go through it. Again, it speaks to our Constitution. I will be 60 in August. I grew up in the Republic before we joined the European Union. It was the time of what was called the pitchfork and the candlestick when we were building social housing for our citizens.”
“The Government agreed that the debt should be socialised - the debt imposed by bankers, property speculators and developers. The narrative was that we had been bailed out by Europe, but that is not what happened. The Irish taxpayer and all our children are still paying that debt. The debt was socialised. I see a number of contradictions in this regard. On the one hand, the Minister for justice, a senior counsel and very eminent lawyer, says that we cannot compel witnesses to participate in a judicial process that is set up in another jurisdiction, yet if the Minister of State rejects this amendment, he is saying that when it comes to exposing the Irish citizens to financial risk, we are quite happy to allow third parties and other interests to come in and speculatively take claims. As Senator Stephenson said, why would they not?”
“This amendment simply asks that we endorse our own sovereignty and say that this “shall not be enforceable or recognised in the State if such awards were sought in a foreign jurisdiction or an international body.” I hope the Minister of State will accept this amendment. It is in our collective self-interest to support it. If the Government is to oppose it, it begs the question as to why we would dilute our sovereign status. Why would we expose Irish citizens to the threat or potential risk of financial exposure? The State has a record in this regard. During the financial crash and crisis, we adhered to the austerity requirements set out by the members of the troika, who stayed across the road in the Merrion Hotel even though the rest of us were struggling to cope with the severe financial restrictions that were placed on us.”
“The Minister made the point that we could not require or compel Irish citizens to give evidence or participate in a judicial process or inquiry that was based in another jurisdiction, albeit on this island. He was really clear about that. I pointed out to him that there were very pressing matters in relation to the Omagh bombing and subsequent attempts to carry out car bombings in Dublin and the UK but he said that, notwithstanding all of that, there could be no crossover between the two jurisdictions. I say this as a layperson who has no legal training whatsoever: I think he is talking about sovereignty there.”
“I welcome the Minister of State and his officials. I will deal with amendments Nos. 4, 5 and 6 in reverse order. Amendment No. 6 seeks to insert: “(4) For the avoidance of doubt, awards under an international agreement referred to in subsection (1) shall not be enforceable or recognised in the State if such awards were sought in a foreign jurisdiction or an international body.”. We have had some very interesting debates in this House over the last number of weeks about the Omagh bombing inquiry Bill. The Minister for justice is a very eminent senior counsel and a person whose legal opinion I would attach great weight to, notwithstanding that one’s professional or industrial experience is not always recognised in this House, it would seem.”
“They have allowed the transit of cluster munitions to be used on young people in Lebanon and in proximity around Irish positions. They then want to play a game of football with them. The situational awareness is completely and utterly absent. I have never seen anything like it.”
“The Government is setting its face against the will of the Irish people. If the former Minister for Defence, Deputy O’Dea, writes an article in the Sunday Independent saying this is the wrong thing to do, and if former Army officers, like me and those writing in the Irish Examiner in recent days, say it is the wrong thing to do, why is the Government doing it? Every time I hear the Minister go out on this, it is misinformation, incorrect information and disinformation. The Government is making a fundamental error. There will be a huge negative public reaction to this. We need to have the Taoiseach in here. We need to have a referendum on neutrality. This community of decision-makers have left our country defenceless.”