I really just wanted to be here to show my support for this Bill and to thank Deputy Ó Snodaigh and everybody who participated in this Bill, as well as the people up in the Gallery. It is incredibly important in this day and age. I am really saddened that we are in a situation that there has been a kick back against such a positive move over the past number of years towards understanding and accepting difference. That is really sad. I find it really difficult when I hear some of the horrific language being used by people on protests against immigration, the LGBTQ community and educating children. We are really going down a very dark road and it is something that everyone of us needs to stand up against. This Bill is part of that. I find it really difficult to understand. I grew up in the north inner city as a teenager in the late 1970s and 1980s. I remember Fairview Park. I was a teenager when a man was beaten to death by people I knew and went to school with. We did not understand because we had been programmed and given information all our lives that this was a horrible thing that these men were doing. A lot of people of my generation and the generations before that believed it. It led to the situation we are in now. We lived in an extremely oppressive and regressive State for many decades from the reds under the bed with Jimmy Gralton, the only Irishman ever to be excluded from his own country because he a communist, and young working class people, boys and girls, were sent to institutions for the most minor of things. They were sent away from their families for years into the likes of St. Joseph's industrial school in Clonmel and Letterfrack. There were many places. We had the Magdalen laundries as well where some young girls were locked up for the rest of their lives, and for what? That is the regressive and the oppressive State. We should never forget that because the minute we try to gloss over that, that is when we start to have these regressive people coming back and we need to stand up against that. I Iistened to and read the Minister's statement. I welcome the fact that there has been movement on it, but why do these things take so long? Why did it take a parliamentary question from Deputy Ó Snodaigh for the Department and Minister to say that we need to deal with this? This should have been dealt with. I read the working group's report. It was one of the main recommendations in the working group. As the Minister said, the number one recommendation was "...a legislative scheme be established to enable the disregard of relevant criminal records and this Bill seeks to deliver on that recommendation". Why did it take so long for us to get something like this done? It is really important that we get it done as quickly as we can. It is the least that we can do as a Legislature. It is the least that we can do in this country to send the message out to those people who are left and to those who have passed away who did nothing wrong. It was the State that was wrong, and the State needs to apologise. I hate to use the word "convictions". They need justice. They did absolutely nothing wrong and that is why the State needs to make their voices heard. I appreciate everybody who has taken part in this debate and those who have been part and parcel of bringing the Bill to where we are now. We really need to move on. Some people do not have the time to hear the words that they have been vindicated.

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