We were sufficiently mature as a State to consider introducing an honours system, maintained Fine Gael Seanad leader, Mr Maurice Manning.
We had no system to honour people such as Mr George Mitchell who had been of enormous assistance in the Northern peace talks. The practice was to ask universities to consider conferring honorary degrees on certain people.
To date it had been impossible to find agreement on an honours system. It seemed to be felt that an honours system would be inappropriate for a republic but many republics had such systems. We were mature enough as a State to confer honours in a non-partisan way on people who had done the State such service. Mr Donie Cassidy agreed to consider a debate on the topic.