Richard Boyd Barrett: Condemns Trump, Demands End to Direct Provision

Taoiseach, Black Lives Matter and racism I think is not so much a virus as a poison deliberately administered. George Floyd was a victim of a murderous, brutal and systemic racism that was deliberately stoked up, encouraged and escalated by the billionaire Donald Trump who uses racism deliberately as even General Mad Dog Mattis has admitted to divide and rule, to deflect away from economic and social injustice and to set people against one another. Will you Taoiseach condemn Donald Trump for his use of racism and police brutality for which George Floyd has lost his life but which millions and millions of Americans and millions across the world are victims? Will you match your words against racism by eliminating the racist injustice that is the direct provision system, an inhumane and degrading system that marks people of colour out as different, as other, as separate and consequently leads to encouraging that poison and racism? Will you accept Taoiseach that the failure to address systemic, ongoing inequality, poverty, injustice also perpetuates the soil in which racism and the divide and rule tactics that we've seen from Donald Trump continue to flourish? Because otherwise condemnation means nothing. Because otherwise condemnation means nothing. We want to eliminate racism, we eschew divide and rule tactics and we address the horrors of poverty and unemployment and homelessness. So if you condemn it, do you also recognise your own government's failure to deal with those ingredients that continue to perpetuate the possibility for that divide and rule poison to be used by cynical and dishonest leaders? Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I asked a question on direct provision earlier. And in relation to the events that we've seen in the United States, as I said earlier, I think we have witnessed a real absence of moral leadership from the top in the United States. We should have had words of unity, words of comfort, words of reconciliation, and we didn't see that. And that is absolutely wrong. And I'm sure that had those events happened in this country or in another country, we would have seen a much better response from the political leadership in this country or in other countries too. You know, racism has many different facets. In the United States, their history of racism is a very different one to ours. It's rooted in history of slavery, which has not yet been overcome. In Ireland, our experience with building a multiracial society is one that is quite different and has different characteristics. And I touched on them in my speech earlier. But I think the whole idea, though, of hearing you speak and preach about divide and rule and divisiveness, you know, almost all of your politics deputy is divisive and populist. It's all about setting up ideas about elites versus the masses, bosses against the others, conspiracies, tearing people down, setting people apart. It's anger, it's rage. You know, what you do is the flip side of that. You know, the far right and the far left aren't very different to me. It's the same kind of thing. You know, conspiracy of elites against the people, simple answers to complex problems. You're not that different, really. Maybe a more accurate description of divide and rule tactics is the false claim that you tried to make in order to boost your political ambitions by decrying the welfare cheats that cheat us all rather than the bankers and the property speculators who truly did cheat us all. But maybe you could address another group who are just about to face an injustice at your hands and indeed have faced police harassment in the last few days. The Debenhams workers who are standing outside the Dáil as we speak and have done every single week for the last number of weeks unceremoniously dumped on the scrap heap by a cynical company using the COVID-19 crisis as a cover for their sheer greed. Who are fighting for decent redundancy terms, who want to be at work, but, and this is critical, many of whom are women part-time workers now on the COVID-19 payment. And, of course, when you ask who were the working poor in this country, they are women part-time workers in the main. Aren't they now going to be the victims of your plan to taper, cut, reduce the 350 pandemic payment? So rather than cut and attack the working poor again, why don't you address the employers who have treated these Debenhams workers in such a cynical way? Thanks, Deputy. The former Debenhams workers should get the redundancy payments they were promised in my view. But as I understand, most of these matters are now matters for the courts and none of us can interfere in that. And it's dishonest to tell people that politicians can interfere in a court process when they cannot. Let me restate what I said earlier about the pandemic unemployment payment. Cabinet will meet tomorrow and make a decision on this. And the assurance that I can give to the 500,000 people or so who are on the pandemic unemployment payment. It will be extended for months, not for weeks, because this pandemic is not over yet. People who were working full-time before the pandemic happened will continue to get the 350 euro payment. Some people who are working part-time will see their payment reduced, but it'll still be more than they were getting before the pandemic. And that would include those Debenhams workers. So they'll still be getting more than they got on a weekly basis in January or February. And what you're doing again is exactly that form of cynical, nasty populism spreading untrudes in order to make people angry, dividing the people from a perceived invented elite, putting emotion over reason and peddling out easy solutions to problems that are complex. It's fundamentally dishonest. It's not very different to what we see from the far right elsewhere.