Peadar Toibín TD has expressed his “vehement opposition” to the government’s emergency power extension bill, and slammed the opposition for what he called “collaboration” with the government on lockdown.
“My political party, Aontú, is vehemently opposed to this Bill and I will be voting against it, as I did in its previous incarnation,” the Deputy said.
“I have been amazed by the lack of analysis of what has happened in this society in recent months. The political and media classes have done little analysis of what is going on.”
Describing Ireland as a “radical outlier” as regards the length and severity of covid-19 restrictions, Toibín said that “no other European country comes near”, and claimed that these measures had been implemented with the “collaboration” of the opposition.
“The fact that this has been done with the collaboration of most of the opposition parties is absolutely incredible,” he said.
“People Before Profit, the Social Democrats and the Labour Party all jumped on the zero-Covid bandwagon. It is an incredible situation. If we were to take these parties’ logic to its conclusion – the idea that we must get to below ten cases per day before we could leave the most restrictive elements of lockdown – most of this country would not open for another six months.”
Continuing on, he described his former party of Sinn Féin as a “major disappointment”, and accused them of “sitting on the fence.”
“Sinn Féin has been a major disappointment,” he said.
“The largest opposition party has sat on the fence for most of the last number of months. There has not been a cigarette paper between Sinn Féin, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael for most of that time. As with the banking bailout vote, proper opposition was missing when it was needed.
“The leader of the Social Democrats complained today that the Opposition was ignored. The Opposition voted in the legislation which facilitated it being ignored just a number of months ago.”
Continuing on, Deputy Toibín described Ireland as a “Petri dish for group think”, and hit out at the lack of diverse opinion in Irish media and politics.
“[Ireland] has all the ingredients of herd mentality,” he said, “with a small and excessively concentrated media and a careerist political class.
“The lack of critique, questioning and challenging is absolutely amazing. Some of those who asked questions lost their jobs and some were vilified and shut up.
“There is a chilling effect in this country with regard to dissent, one of the most important elements of a healthy, functioning democracy. Deleting the ability for citizens to safely dissent creates a dangerous situation in any democracy. That groupthink has been obvious on many occasions in Irish society, including during the banking crisis and the housing crisis, but I have never seen it as pervasive as it has been during this crisis.”