Superfluous and should be abolished. - Joe Higgins

We want to see measures to implement taxation justice for ordinary working people. We want an end to the policy of many years now, of huge tax concessions for big corporations and a plethora of stealth taxes on ordinary families and ordinary working people.

This is a challenge to the entire trade union movement in Ireland - a declaration of war on the wages and working conditions of all workers.

The overall agenda here is quite simply the ruling classes, or the classes of Europe intend to stride on to the world stage as a powerful economic entity. And they want to be as powerful as the US, meaning they want a stronger foreign policy and a military wing to back them up. But I can assure the Government that the debate will be a very intensive debate, a very vigorous debate and I think the benefit perhaps this time is that certain distractions that were raised the last time would be set aside, and therefore we can concentrate on the more fundamental issues. [...] Take for example this notion that Irish youth would be conscripted into an army. The only people I heard that from was Government ministers in the course of the campaign who said this is being said. Nobody here raised any such red herring. These were the so-called concerns that were being addressed. But the major concerns as to what the Treaty was really about has not been changed one iota.