National Party leader and Councillor for Fingal, Patrick Quinlan, decided today on a novel approach to what he considers to be an attempt to restrict what he can say as an elected member to the local authority.
A motion had been placed before the Organisation, Procedures and Finance Committee meeting by Councillor Joan Hopkins of the Social Democrats regarding “Use of unbecoming language at Council meetings.”
Readers may recall that Councillor Quinlan had been described as a “disgusting person” by a communist representative, Owen Mulligan, when Councillor Quinlan used the term ‘non-national’ at a Fingal Council meeting on January 12 in the context of a reference to housing demand.
As Quinlan pointed out, the term ‘non-national’ is officially used by a range of official bodies including the Central Statistics Office. Indeed, as I have pointed out it is often used as a means to disguise the true extent of immigration by excluding from the statistics the hundreds of thousands of persons born outside of the state who reside in the state but who have not acquired citizenship.
The Soc Dem motion continues in the same vein as “disgusted of Swords.”
Hopkins calls on the CEO to “take steps to ensure that specific language is not allowable on any questions or motions at Council meetings that are not compatible with equality rights in Ireland such as non-national, indigenous and where information is being sought where people are being discriminated based on gender, age, nationality, religious beliefs etc.”
While normally, no one outside of a Student Union committee would take such a proposal seriously, the director of People, Corporate and Digital Services for Fingal clearly did. Hence the motion being given a hearing with the pledge that if the motion was passed that “the terms therein will be included in the Standing Order Review process.”
Presumably if buoyed by success here, the Soc Dems – fresh from assuring the country at the weekend they embody the very essence of tolerance, diversity, democracy and apple pie – will rally the other supporters of the proposal to censor Councillor Quinlan’s use of language by demanding that the Dáil pass similar strictures against the CSO, the Department of Social Protection and anyone else who uses the term ‘non-national’ instead of Johnny Foreigner or whatever Orwellian device they think to be a suitable alternative.
Councillor Quinlan described Councillor Hopkin’s motion as “nothing but a desperate, targeted gag order aimed at silencing Councillors who expose hard realities: housing shortages, worsened by mass immigration, resource strain from unchecked demographic shifts”, and what he claims is “the deliberate hiding of nationality data in (housing) allocation stats.”
He also pointed out that the existing Standing Order 55 already provided – and had been deployed – for the Meetings Administrator to block anything deemed to be “unreasonable, unsuitable, frivolous, or derogatory to the Council’s dignity.”
There is, of course, no such prohibition of such terms or discourse that is applied to political speech anywhere else outside of Fingal County Council if it approves of this. Nor is it in line with the constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech under Article 46.6.1 Nor would it appear to be compatible with any of the existing employment and discrimination legislation.
The meeting of the Committee was held in private unlike the full Council meetings which are streamed live over the Council’ public portal. Councillor Quinlan objected to this, claiming that people had the right to see what was taking place behind closed doors.
Rather than have the Hopkins’ motion debated and voted upon, it was simply accepted by the Committee Chair and presumably will now become part of the amended Standing Order. That will happen if the review includes Hopkins’ proposal which will then go before the Council as a whole.
Which it will be interesting to watch being tested given the Stalinist intent behind it that would impose absurd restrictions on what Councillors are allowed to say, or even ask about in questions and motions to the Council. It will be particularly interesting to see what stance Sinn Féin takes given that when its Councillors first began to attend meetings in the north the unionist parties went to great lengths to silence them.