Defence (Amendment) Bill 2024: Committee Stage
Seanad Éireann — 2024-07-03
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Michael McDowell (IND), National University of Ireland

With respect, that means that somebody who is not a member of such an organisation cannot comment even on his or her organisation in public statements. If RACO says it opposes X, Y and Z, and that is permitted under section 24, 2A and 3A, it means that somebody else in the Defence Forces cannot even publicly disagree with his or her own representative organisation on the matter because he or she is not an officer of those organisations. Somebody cannot say that position does not represent his or her view or his or her opinion, the great majority of members' views, or is not in conformity with what many people in the Defence Forces believe. That is the problem there, because section 2A and the subsections in section 3 mean that the Minister effectively can come up-----

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2024-07-03/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:53:09+00:00
Sitting date: 2024-07-03