On behalf of my Independent colleagues I would also like to associated with the good wishes to our colleague, Mr. Hickey. I again appeal to the Tánaiste to accept Deputy Ó Broin's very reasonable Bill which we will discuss later on this evening.

I want to ask the Tánaiste about a programme in his Department for the Uighur nation in China. I have asked the Tánaiste about this several times and about the fact that concentration camps have been established by the Chinese Government over recent years in which up to 2 million Uighur people, who form a central Asian nation that should be independent, have been incarcerated by the Chinese Government. This is happening on the Tánaiste's watch. We know the history of concentration camps on our Continent and we know about the outrageous events that happened in the past, most recently in the former Yugoslavia. There are concentration camps right now in north-west China in the Uighur nation, which, like Tibet beside it, should be an independent country, but this Chinese dictatorship that illegally took over those countries in the late 1940s continues to do this and to incarcerate a very significant section, particularly the young men, of that nation, which is mostly an Islamic nation. Is the Tánaiste doing anything about this? It is happening on his watch. What sanctions are the Tánaiste and the European Union going to take?

These issues were raised recently in Brussels when the Chinese foreign minister came and spoke to EU foreign ministers. There was an open and quite constructive debate on this issue and these concerns and he responded in quite an open manner.