The phrase "a decade of debate" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used to refer to a period of ten years during which a particular topic or issue has been discussed or argued.
Example: "The climate change policy has evolved significantly over a decade of debate among scientists and policymakers."
Alternatives: "ten years of discussion" or "a ten-year discourse".
Still, it takes the Rules Committee a decade of debate to move a comma.
In 1985, after more than a decade of debate, Westway was abandoned.
de Groot, B. L. & Hub, J. S. A decade of debate: significance of CO2 permeation through membrane channels still controversial.
That was the year that Louis Silverstein, with the nervous approval of his tradition-minded superiors, got rid of it, ending more than a decade of debate.
The Genetic Non-Discrimination Act, which prohibits genetic discrimination in employment or health insurance, passed after more than a decade of debate, removing a potential barrier to use.
In Fairfax County, Virginia, it took a decade of debate before the school board voted in 2014 to push back the opening school bell for its 57,000 students.
Next came a decade of debates about domestic labor, so household employees working at least two days a week for the same person were added in 1950 (not all of them reported, as we learned via "Nannygate" when Zoe Baird was nixed as Attorney General back in 1993, along with nonprofit workers and the self-employed.
A decade of fruitless debate resulted in a 2012 Unesco order that any work on the site would be "inauthentic".
And most of all, after a decade of passionate debate, we must recapture the common purpose that we shared at the beginning of this time of war.
The decision by Molloy's board of trustees last year to go one step further and make the school coeducational came after a decade of emotional debate.
His government has passed a human rights act, after more than a decade of fierce debate, that will log atrocities and fund local groups.
