Defence Forces Dail Éireann — 2025-11-06 ============================================================ Donnchadh Ó Laoghaire (SF), Cork South-Central However, only one political party - it was not his party - came to the last general election with anything even resembling a manifesto commitment that gave it any kind of mandate. Deputy Murphy is right when he suggests there is a better way of defining public opinion. If the Government is willing - we are certainly willing - to put this to the people and have a clear question asked of them in order to get a clear answer in relation to this, I am quite confident as to what the outcome will be. The presidential election might be the best barometer we have, albeit imperfect and thrown in with a lot of other things. However, the Government has the ability for a more precise measurement of public opinion. Why not proceed with that? --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2025-11-06/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-09-21T01:01:05+00:00 Sitting date: 2025-11-06