The Order of Business is No.1, motion regarding the arrangements for the sitting of the House on Friday, 18 June 2021, to be taken on conclusion of the Order of Business, without debate; and No. 2, Criminal Justice (Perjury and Related Offences) Bill 2018 [Seanad Bill amended by the Dáil] – Report and Final Stages, to be taken at 11.45 a.m. and to conclude at 12.45 p.m. by the putting of one question from the Chair, which shall, in relation to amendments, include only those set down or accepted by the Government.

I thank the Leader for outlining the Order of Business, which I certainly support. Unusually for Senators, I will talk about the Order of Business by acknowledging we are finally coming to the end of a Bill introduced in the previous Seanad by former Senator, Pádraig Ó Céidigh. I pay tribute to him, particularly, for the effort he put into bringing this Bill through that Seanad. I also acknowledge the contribution of the Regional Group, which brought it through the Dáil. It will, hopefully, be passed today. It is very useful legislation that, surprisingly, was not previously on the Statute Book. People will now, hopefully, take the offence of perjury more seriously and people who decide to perjure themselves or commit perjury in a court will be pursued more diligently than they have been in the past.

I acknowledge there are significant numbers of people, particularly from Donegal but also Mayo, coming to the convention centre today to highlight their plight regarding mica in their homes. For any of us, the purchase and building of a home is the biggest investment most of us will ever make, certainly in a personal capacity. These defective blocks were sold to so many people who built their houses, which are their sanctuaries, where they live and raise families and where they think they can go to protect themselves from the whole world, only to discover their houses were crumbling and falling down around their ears. It is shocking this was allowed to happen and the people who sold these blocks will not, and cannot, be pursued. I hope that somebody tries. The State should make sure that we protect people and give them redress. The Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, and the Cabinet are dealing with that today, but we really must pursue people.

We need a debate on building controls generally in this House. All of us know of people who have had great experiences with builders and contractors, but equally we all have horror stories. Many of us on local authorities know of people whose houses were not completed properly, where workmanship was shoddy and the tradesmen involved did not do what they were supposed to. We need, as a State, to make sure people working on sites are competent and able to what they do, and, if they are not, that they can be pursued. It is not okay for people to engage in shoddy workmanship. It happens all the time; obviously not in every situation but too often. We need, as a State, to look at how we regulate. People get planning permission, which they do not necessarily complete. There are no checks on that. We need a proper debate and decent action on how we pursue people who do not complete houses the way they should and do not carry out the work they were engaged to do.

I am doing something unusual this morning; I am opposing the Order of Business. I do so because I object to the Government's disgusting habit of constantly proposing, and implementing, the guillotining of legislation in this House. It happened again on Committee Stage of the Affordable Housing Bill on Friday, 4 June. Many amendments were not discussed, including one of mine. We have been promised so often that the guillotine would only be used sparingly, but that is not what is happening. It would be interesting to get the Oireachtas Library and Research Service to examine when this practice of ruthlessly guillotining discussion of legislation started. On that particular day, 4 June, the worst of it was a Committee Stage debate on housing was guillotined to give way to a Private Members' motion on housing from Fianna Fáil Senators on the question of a constitutional right to housing, something specifically excluded from the programme for Government. That sums up the attitude of the three largest political parties to housing. Instead of devoting more time to debating housing legislation, they provide time to allow debate on a toothless motion purely for political grandstanding. It is high time Government Senators stood up to their party leaders and told them to back off. The reputation of the Seanad is destroyed every time this guillotining rule is implemented.

I also raise today the strange attitudes of the Department of Foreign Affairs. On 19 May, the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Deputy Simon Coveney, met the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Iran, which was a friendly meeting by all accounts, complete with elbow bumps. On 1 June, the Minister, Deputy Coveney, visited China and made a very emollient statement afterwards of the kind we have become used to. It was certainly nothing China would object to. The same week the Minister launched a ferocious attack on Israel in the Dáil regarding the conflict there and, just 24 hours after returning from China, he correctly denounced the President of Belarus as having no democratic legitimacy. How can he excoriate Israel one day and have friendly elbow bumps with the foreign minister of a country supplying the rockets Hamas use to attack Israel the next? How can he have friendly meetings with a totalitarian communist government and then accuse Belarus of having no democratic legitimacy? What does it say about the moral underpinning of Irish foreign policy? Have we stopped pretending we base our foreign policy on morality and human rights, instead sacrificing both on the altar of trade links? It is hardly a coincidence that we are trying to expand our exports to China and Iran but have negligible exports to Israel and almost none to Belarus.

I will conclude by referring to a very troubling paragraph I came across in an important book, Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World. It describes how the Chinese People's Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries, CPAFFC, is actually a front for the Chinese Communist Party. In May 2019, the Chinese news agency, Xinhua, reported on the signing of a memorandum of understanding between CPAFFC and a think tank in Ireland, Asia Matters, "to promote people-to-people exchanges and co-operation". According to this report, at the ceremony, Ireland's foreign minister and deputy prime minister, Simon Coveney, said that the deepening relationship would help Ireland reach out to the European Union so as to advance China's interest in the EU. Does that not say it all? We need a debate on China and our Government's attitude to it.