The Government should have the courage to condemn the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by US forces and not wait for the completion of US and UN inquiries to "arrive at an opinion", the Dáil was told.
Labour's foreign affairs spokesman, Mr Michael D. Higgins, said that "there was a time when this country had an opinion and governments were not afraid to state where we stood on issues like this".
The Galway West TD was also highly critical of recent comment on Iraq published by The Irish Times.
He was speaking during a 2½-hour debate which took place in the wake of the release of photos showing abuses of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison. He said that when he first stood for election in 1969, people in politics could be expected to speak out.
"At the time the concept of a press release did not exist. However, people like Michael McInerney and Donal Foley wrote articles in the newspapers when The Irish Times was a newspaper of record.
"I now read articles in The Irish Times by somebody included for balance, Mark Steyn, who referred to what took place in Abu Ghraib in an interesting way. He referred to the bodies piled and manacled on top of each other as follows: 'Making a homo-erotic pyramid of young Iraqi men naked with their bottoms in the air is not my idea of a good time.' There was a time when that piece would not appear in The Irish Times.
"Repeatedly this column of bigotry, homophobia and racism that is presented every Monday contains attacks on what we call the basic decencies on some principle of balance. The editor of that newspaper would want to indicate to me what she is balancing when she produces material like that.
"I worked on the McBride commission on prisoners. When we published the report and the minister would not agree to discuss it with us, we could rely on The Irish Times to be interested in prison welfare. However, instead of this we are supposed to take the notion that this is an arena of abuse."
Mr Higgins said the "beheading of a person in front of a camera is an appalling level to which to sink, and condemnations of such an act should be unequivocal. I condemn Islamic extremism. How can one argue, as I have seen in various newspaper columns, that there is some kind of equivalence?
"In The Irish Times Mark Steyn said there had been more fuss about a man with women's underwear over his head than about a man who had no head at all. This is typical of the slick, degrading, immoral rubbish which is being propounded every Monday in that newspaper. It is an example of the degraded level to which we are falling and the loss of the moral capacity to debate these issues."
Earlier the former Fine Gael leader, Mr Michael Noonan, said that the US, Britain and other coalition allies had to transfer power immediately to Iraqis even though "they will do so at an enormous price".
Describing the conflict in Iraq as "an appalling tragedy", he said that "we have witnessed breaches of the Geneva Convention by the US and Great Britain and appalling numbers of civilian casualties, and we have heard reports of the killing of 40 people at a wedding party as late as yesterday. As day follows day, the moral basis of the intervention, to which there was never a legal basis, falls into decline." He said that "the United Nations must get involved again and try to provide a real legal basis for the occupation of Iraq. Without it, we are going nowhere."
