Prohibition of Forcible Entry and Occupation Bill, 1970: Second Stage.

Minister for Justice (Mr. O'Malley)

I move: "That the Bill be now read a Second Time."

This is a Bill to deal with a problem to which the community has been increasingly exposed in recent times and which finds expression in the forcible occupation of other people's property, mainly at the instigation of quasi-political groups, and forcible interference with the legitimate rights of the owners and sometimes of the general public as well.

Since the House is well aware of the activities with which the Bill is concerned I need not refer to them in detail but I would like to make it clear that the Bill applies not only to the forcible occupation of buildings but also to the type of intimidatory exercises that have come to be known as fish-ins.

In a democracy such as ours, where there are no permanent political minorities, there are adequate democratic processes not only for ventilating dissatisfaction with the existing order of things but also for resolving grievances and differences of opinion. Changes in law and policy can be, and are, secured by these processes. Unfortunately, some of those who seek change are not prepared to abide by. the rules which our society has laid down for the conduct of its affairs. Instead, they resort to force and violence—or, as they would call it, "direct action"—to achieve their aims. In recent years we have seen a growing tendency on the part of individuals and groups within the community not only to behave as if they were outside or above the law but to claim that they are entitled to act in this way. It is clear that this development strikes at the very roots of our society and could not be allowed indefinitely to go unchecked.

The Bill provides for the creation of three new offences in relation to land and vehicles, namely, forcible entry, dealt with in section 2, forcible occupation, dealt with in section 3 and encouraging and advocating the commission of these offences, section 4. "Vehicle" as defined in section 1 means an aircraft not in flight, a train, an omnibus or a boat, ship or other vessel. The terms "forcibly" and "forcible" are defined in section 1— they include unspoken threats of force caused by the weight of numbers but, on the other hand, do not cover peaceful picketing or the like. In section 3 the action of locking or barring doors, windows, et cetera, and the action of erecting physical obstructions to entry will constitute forcible occupation, where, but only where, such actions are calculated to prevent or obstruct the entry of any person lawfully entitled to enter. Since the Bill is not designed to deal with such forms of occupation as, for example, where a “wandering minstrel” sleeps in a disused outhouse, or an itinerant or other homeless family seeks temporary shelter in an abandoned farmhouse, an exception is made in section 2 for a person who, having forcibly entered land or a vehicle, does not interfere with the use and enjoyment of the land or vehicle by the owner and, if requested to leave by the owner or by a uniformed garda, does so with all reasonable speed and in a peaceful manner.

Section 4, subsection (2), of the Bill provides that, where a statement encouraging or advocating the commission of an offence of forcible entry or occupation is made by or on behalf of a group of persons, each member of the group will be guilty of an offence. Contrary to what I understand has been suggested by some critics, there is in this no element of guilt by association. A member of a group is not being held responsible for what other members say unless what is said was said by or on behalf of the group. Here I would point out that whether a statement has been made on behalf of a group is a question of fact which the prosecution would have to prove and, accordingly, the provision could not apply to a statement purporting to be made on behalf of the group which was actually made by some outsider. Even though the provision is limited in this way, it might be unfair to individual members of a group to allow them no line of retreat where a spokesman has perhaps said more than some members would wish and subsection (3) of section 4 provides, therefore, that it will be a good defence for a person charged with such an offence to prove that he immediately took all reasonable steps open to him to dissociate himself from the statement or that the statement was made without his knowledge or that it was made without his consent.

The Bill has been framed on the basis that the sanction of the criminal law should not be invoked as a substitute for civil action against trespass or to protect property rights or remedy civil wrongs where the circumstances are such that there is no threat to the community and no general public interest is involved. The Bill will not, therefore, apply to incidents that arise in the course of private disputes between persons having different estates or interests in the same land, for example, between landlord and tenant or between mortgagor and mortagee. These are matters to be regulated only by existing civil property law.

Where a person commits an offence of forcible entry or forcible occupation, it will, in the overwhelming majority of cases, be in circumstances where he has no colour of right to the property entered or occupied. Consequently, it would in the ordinary way be unreasonable to the point of absurdity to require the prosecution to go through the tedious and possibly costly process of proving ownership that is not being challenged. Members of the House who have had personal experience of the purchase or sale of a house will appreciate that proof of title can be a tedious process. Accordingly section 5 of the Bill provides that, unless the defendant shows to the satisfaction of the court that he has a bona fide claim to ownership of the property, it will not be necessary for the prosecution to prove ownership.

It may happen that, when squatters or protest groups occupy buildings and refuse to leave, it will become necessary for the owner to use some force to eject them and, in the process, he may cause damage to his property. A practical example of this is where an owner had to break down a door of his house that was barred against him. Since damage reasonably caused in such circumstances is directly attributable to the refusal of the illegal occupiers to get out when asked to do so, the Bill proposes, in section 6, that the court, in coming to a decision as to a penalty appropriate to the offence, should be able to take account of the damage as if it were damage caused by the defendant and also to take into consideration whether the defendant had compensated the owner for the damage. Section 6 also provides that the owner may recover the amount of the damage as a simple contract debt in civil proceedings.

The penalties for offences are provided in section 7. Increased penalties are prescribed for second and subsequent offences tried summarily but all the offences are to be triable either summarily or on indictment. Because the district court has no basic jurisdiction in regard to title to land, it is necessary to provide that jurisdiction in summary proceedings will not be ousted by reason solely of a question of title to land being brought into issue. Likewise, decisions of the district court in prosecutions under this Bill would not affect questions of title. Both these matters are dealt with in section 8.

Because the offences created by the Bill are indictable it will be possible for the Garda Síochána to apply for warrants of arrest where necessary. However, there may be cases where an offence under section 3 has taken place and the circumstances are such that serious damage to, say, a building, or serious interference with the lawful rights of the owner in relation thereto, or serious inconvenience to the public wishing to transact business in the building, is being or will be caused as a result of the continuance of the offence and the only way of preventing the damage or inconvenience or of minimising it would be for the gardaí to arrest those concerned immediately. Accordingly, section 9 of the Bill provides for the vesting in the Garda Síochána of a power of arrest without warrant in what is an emergency situation. This arises only in relation to an offence under section 3. Deputies will notice that all the four conditions set out in section 9 for the exercise of the power of arrest must be satisfied—they are not alternatives.

So far as the problem of squatting is concerned, the provisions of this Bill are of general application and will extend to squatting in local authority dwellings as well as privately owned houses. I want to make it clear, however, that the provisions of the Bill are without prejudice to section 13 of the Housing Act, 1970, which makes it an offence for an unauthorised person to enter a local authority dwelling in certain circumstances. That section was enacted last summer to deal with an urgent and serious situation that had arisen in relation to squatting in houses owned by Dublin Corporation. The section is part of the Housing Code and its enforcement is a matter for local authorities. It will remain on the Statute Book alongside the provisions contained in this Bill, which, as I have said are of general application. It may well be that section 13 of the Housing Act will prove adequate to deal with the problems confronting local authorities in this regard. On the other hand, it is easy to envisage circumstances in which certain provisions of this Bill would be needed to supplement what is in the Housing Act. I am thinking primarily of section 4 of the Bill, under which it will be possible to deal with organisations which encourage and advocate squatting for quasi-political motives, and section 6, which will enable an owner to recover in civil proceedings the amount of any damage involved in recovering possession of property taken over by squatters.

While I do not propose to involve myself in any discussion on housing matters, I think that, in so far as the Bill does seek to deal with the problem of squatting in local authority houses, it is necessary to say this much by way of justification of it. Dublin and to a lesser extent other cities and towns, like cities and towns in every other country that we know of, have a shortage of houses, though it is of nothing like the dimensions that some of the critics would have us think. Those who have studied the problem most extensively say that the only city without a housing problem is a city that is dead or at least dying. If they are right in this—and I believe they are — we must accept as a fact that urban housing shortages cannot be solved overnight, particularly in a country like ours that has limited resources. Given that situation, it is essential that priorities should be determined in a rational and objective way and that needs should be met in accordance with these priorities. The people who are most vociferous in their protests are rarely those in most urgent need. If there is to be elementary justice, houses must continue to be allocated in an orderly manner and in accordance with the priorities established by the local authority. I suggest that all of us here can and must agree that this is so and that the allocation cannot be allowed to be decided by small unrepresentative groups using force.

The Government—and, I would submit, not only the Government but the Oireachtas — has the duty to protect the rights and the freedoms of all citizens — not just the most noisy elements. To say that is not to condemn people for voicing their grievances and for keeping on doing so. Protest and pressure for change are not in themselves bad. On the contrary, human progress can be measured by the extent of man's questioning of himself and his environment and his willingness to adopt new concepts when the old ones have proved inadequate or unsuitable. Consequently, although many of us disagree profoundly with the ideas of some of those who are at present seeking to change the existing order of things and although we may, with justification, suspect their motives, we can and must respect, and if necessary defend, their right to propound their ideas and to voice their dissatisfactions, provided that they for their part understand that the majority, too, have rights. But when people resort to force and violence to achieve their ends, the situation takes on a different complexion. As I said earlier, ours is a democratic régime in which there are democratic processes for dealing with grievances and, where necessary, altering laws and policies. In these circumstances there can be no justification for the use of force and violence. If the foundations of democracy are liberty and order, let us not forget that without order there can be no liberty.

It so happens that just at the moment we are in a period of relative quiet so far as the particular problem with which the Bill is designed to deal is concerned. I think it is fortunate that this is so because it enables us to examine the proposals in the Bill in a more detached way than might perhaps be the case if our deliberations were to take place against a background of heat engendered by particular incidents.

Before I conclude, I want to stress that I do not put forward this Bill as the last word in perfection. I put it forward as a reasonable and moderate attempt to meet a serious and recurring problem. Some may think it is not strong enough: others that it may go further than is necessary. I shall be glad to hear the views of the House and to consider any suggestions that may be made for its improvement.

With that, I commend the Bill to the House.

Mr. T.J. Fitzpatrick

(Cavan): The introduction of this Bill by the Minister for Justice is a serious reflection on the Government. I say that because the reasons given by the Minister for the introduction of this Bill pinpoint the failure of the Government in certain respects. The Minister in the second paragraph of his speech says:

With those few lines the Minister skated over the entire background to this piece of legislation, quite understandably as far as he is concerned.

Apart from the fish-ins, this Bill is being introduced by the Minister because of the protests and demonstrations in regard to the Hume Street houses last year and because of squatting by certain persons to highlight the disgraceful condition of housing and the homeless in this city and throughout the country. I propose to deal very briefly with the Hume Street demonstrations. It is hard really to blame the students and others who demonstrated, first peacefully and eventually in an unlawful manner, to publicise the fact that Georgian houses in Dublin were being demolished, were to be replaced by modern office blocks and the city of Dublin thereby was to be robbed of its character.

The history of that episode can be very briefly told. These people had a legitimate and understandable point of view. They protested in a peaceable and orderly manner for many months. They sought to convince the powers-that-be that it was wrong to pull down these houses and that a great number of people in the city and throughout the country favoured the retention of these houses as part of the character of their capital city. They did that in a lawful way until they were blue in the face. The Government would not listen to them. The Minister for Local Government would not listen to them. The Government, through their spokesman in this House, insulted the protestors and those who agreed with them by describing them as "belted earls" and other derogatory and, in Irish conditions, insulting names.

Let us see what happened. Lawful protest got these people nowhere. Lawful protests were ignored. There was a newspaper campaign, a perfectly legitimate campaign. I think I am right in saying there were lawful pickets, lawful marches, lawful protests, banners, placards, the lot, and they were all ignored, and the spokesman on behalf of the Government here had very hard things indeed to say about these people and expressed his utter contempt for them and all that they stood for. But when these people, still believing that they were right, that they had a legitimate argument, that the Government were unreasonable, were driven to unlawful means, to forcible entry, to unlawful squatting, the Government climbed down. The Minister for Industry and Commerce—he is now Minister for Finance—gave an assurance that the houses would stand, that they would be preserved. Lawful efforts failed but unlawful efforts prevailed.

I think, and many think with me, that if item No. 21 on today's Order Paper had been dealt with months ago the Hume Street episode could not have been used as an excuse for introducing this Bill. Item No. 21 is the Local Government (Planning and Development) (No. 2) Bill, 1969. The object of the Bill is to remove to some extent planning appeals from politics. It does not go as far as the Bill that this party introduced before to remove planning appeals entirely from politics and hand them over to an independent tribunal which would adjudicate on them in an impartial way, free from backdoor whisperings, from political party influence or vested interests.

It was only because of unfair decisions regarding the use of the Hume Street houses that the people were driven first to peaceful street protests and, in the final analysis, to the unlawful method with which the Government disagreed but to which it succumbed. The other sit-in or squatting protests in this city were staged mainly by people who had become frustrated and exasperated waiting for houses for years. It would be difficult to blame people in many parts of Ireland, urban and rural, if they adopted illegal means to draw the attention of the powers-that-be to the circumstances in which they are living as regards houses. A person waiting for a pre-fab, which is something that should be put up in a matter of weeks, may have to wait months and sometimes years. This is the sort of dereliction of duty on the part of this Government which drives decent, law-abiding citizens to break the law to ventilate their just grievances.

As regards fish-ins, have the Government done anything to inquire whether there are abuses by absentee landlords or find out whether local people have grievances? I do not think they have.

Mr. O'Malley

They set up a commission which has been sitting for the past year.

Mr. T.J. Fitzpatrick

(Cavan): I suppose the Minister, new as he is, knows that the best way of putting something in cold storage, forgetting about it, is to set up a commission.

Mr. O'Malley

All right. Do not set it up: is that the solution?

Mr. T.J. Fitzpatrick

(Cavan): Do something practical about it. So much for the background to the Bill and why the Minister found it necessary to introduce it. I say it condemns the Government for dereliction of duty on a number of headings. So far as the general policy of the Bill is concerned, I and this Party believe in the rights of individuals, not only in the rights of landlords, but in the rights of the ordinary man who occupies a house or land whether he occupies it as owner or as tenant, but this Bill will need a lot of thought and consideration before this House could pass it. Certain portions of it seem to me dangerous and quite unnecessary.

I refer the Minister to section 1 and the definition of owner, "owner' in relation to land, includes the lawful occupier,..." I have no quarrel with that; "every person lawfully entitled to the immediate use and enjoyment of unoccupied land,"... I have no quarrel with that definition, but "any person having an estate or interest in land" is to be treated as the owner for the purposes of this Bill and in particular for the purposes of section 2 of this Bill. That could mean a fee farm grant or somebody who has parted with occupation of the land so long as he is paid his nominal ground rent which may now be compulsorily bought out for something like 14 years purchase. I think that definition should go out immediately because when you come to section 2 of the Bill it says that a person who forcibly enters land or a vehicle shall be guilty of an offence unless he is the owner of the land, or the vehicle. If my reading is correct that means that a head landlord or a fee farm grantor who has no right or entitlement under any circumstances, unless his rent is not paid or the terms of the grant are broken, to enter the land, may do so by virtue of this legislation and he will not be regarded as committing an offence. That is dangerous and quite unnecessary.

I am totally against section 4 of this measure which I do not think is necessary. This is the section which makes it an offence if a person encourages or advocates the commission of an offence under sections 2 or 3 of this Act. It goes on to say:

Where a statement in contravention of subsection (1) of this section is made by or on behalf of a group of persons, each member of the group shall be guilty of an offence.

What is a group of persons? Where is the definition of "a group of persons" in this Bill? It would be very difficult to define a group. Are they to be associated under some set of rules, under a constitution? Are they to be incorporated or unincorporated? Are they to be some people who meet socially?

It goes on to say:

Where a person is charged with an offence under sub-section (2) of this section it shall be a defence to the charge to show—

(a) that as soon as possible after the statement was made he took all reasonable steps to dissociate himself from the contents of the statement,...

How can he do that? Is he to buy newspaper space or get a loundspeaker van to go around the area telling all and sundry that he dissociates himself from this? It is not workable. That the statement was made without his knowledge or consent — how is he to prove that? I say that section 4 is an unnecessary and dangerous section and I intend to oppose it in toto on Committee Stage.

I also think that section 5 goes too far. Section 5 more or less shifts the onus of proof on to the defendant.

I am against these sections in criminal legislation. The section-says:

In any proceedings in relation to an offence under section 2, 3 or 4 of this Act or to conspiracy to commit such an offence, unless the defendant shows to the satisfaction of the court that he or, in the case of proceedings relating to an offence under section 4, every person whom he encouraged or attempted to encourage has a bona fide claim to ownership of the land or vehicle, it shall not be necessary for the prosecution to prove ownership of the land or vehicle.

My reading of that section is that if a person bona fide believes that he has a right to enter land and honestly does so under that bona fide belief, once the State proves that somebody else owns the land then the person who is accused is guilty of a criminal offence under this measure notwithstanding—I would advise the Minister, as I see him shaking his head, to read this section a few times.

Mr. O'Malley

I would advise the Deputy to read it.

Mr. T.J. Fitzpatrick

(Cavan): I would advise the Minister to read it. However, we will go into it in greater detail on Committee Stage. It says:

In any proceedings in relation to an offence under sections 2, 3 or 4 of this Act or to conspiracy to commit such an offence, unless the defendant shows to the satisfaction of the court that he or, in the case of proceedings relating to an offence under section 4, every person whom he encouraged or attempted to encourage has a bona fide claim to ownership of the land or vehicle, it shall not be necessary for the prosecution to prove ownership of the land or vehicle.

—I want to put it to the Minister that the meaning of that is that once the State proves ownership——

Mr. O'Malley

But the section says that they need not prove ownership.

Mr. T.J. Fitzpatrick

(Cavan): It does if a person shows that he has a bona fide claim. Unless the person shows that he has a bona fide claim the State need not prove ownership.

The Minister thought necessary to refer to this matter of an arrest without a warrant and to say that all the conditions here must be complied with, that there was "and", "and", "and". I believe that in the present state of the law and the number of people who are entitled to issue warrants, it should always be reasonably practicable to obtain a warrant. This sort of arrest without a warrant is creeping into Act after Act, Bill after Bill that comes into this House, and it is a move in the wrong direction. The Minister has told us that notwithstanding the Housing Act of last year, which dealt with squatting in corporation houses, this Bill is intended to apply to such squatting. I should like the Minister to clarify what he means here. I sincerely hope that by squatting he does not mean sub-letting; that he does not mean that unfortunate parents who take in their children, or in-laws, or relatives who have not got houses are going to be treated as squatters or people in unlawful occupation under this measure and prosecuted.

As I said at the beginning, if the Government had been doing their business, if they had accepted the Planning Appeals Bill which was introduced by this party, debated here for months during Private Members' time and decried by the then Minister for Local Government this measure would not be necessary. I believe that if the Bill introduced by the same Minister who decried our Bill and which has been on the Order Paper since 1969, had been gone ahead with, if we had got our priorities right and removed the necessity for these so-called unlawful protests there would not be any necessity for this measure. I also believe that if the motions standing in the names of members of this party and members of the Labour Party for discussion in Private Members' time, and which are never taken, urging the Government to have a crash programme with regard to the housing shortage were dealt with and if the extreme cases of bad housing were dealt with the unlawful protests which the Minister fears and talks about would not take place and this Bill would not be necessary.

It is significant that once the Government yielded to what they call the unlawful demonstration, sit-in, or squatin in Hume Street last year, as the Minister said, we have had no more of that. The people proved by these unlawful protests that they were right and the Minister and the Government were wrong. That is the sad part of the business. That still would not deter me from accepting the principles in this Bill, but the cut-down principles, the principles, as I say, with the amendment in regard to ownership which I have spoken about, the complete exclusion from the Bill of section 4, and the amending of section 5, as well as other amendments which may be necessary when this Bill is gone over with a fine comb.

This Bill was conceived by the Government in or about the time of the Hume Street episode or the other sit-in or squatting in Dublin to highlight the housing scandal in this city. It was hatched and decided upon in those circumstances.

The Minister has said in the concluding part of his speech that happily those conditions no longer exist. Would the Minister consider leaving this Bill on the Order Paper for some considerable time? I want to repeat that so far as Sections 2 and 3 are concerned and so far as they are necessary to preserve the right of individuals— whether they are lowly working-class people or belted earls, as described by a former Minister in this House — I am in favour so long as they are necessary. However, they would not have been necessary if this Government had discharged their obligation to the people. In that atmosphere, and in view of the fact that there has been no repetition of this, would the Minister consider either of two courses: making this a temporary measure to be reviewed in three years, or leaving it on the Order Paper to be activated at a later date if necessary?

Mr. Pattison

We must question the reasoning and the cause which prompted the introduction of this Bill. The haste with which it has been introduced must be commented on. There are many important proposals and Bills to be debated in this House and it is difficult to understand how this Bill has now jumped the queue. More than 12 months ago, the then Minister for Justice made a rather lengthy statement about the so-called progressive law reform programme being undertaken by his Department and the necessity to carry out that programme as quickly as possible. In his summary of the measures which he intended to put forward during 1970 and 1971 there was no mention of a Bill such as that now before us.

The truth of the matter is simply that this is a further public display of the Government's failure and inability to deal with the question of lack of housing and its associated social problems, such as the problem of exorbitant rents for very bad flats, rooms and so on. Apparently there is a lack of confidence within the Government that these problems will be solved in the forseeable future and they want to ensure that public protest and the resulting publicity is discouraged and eliminated to avoid the embarrassment that such protest may cause the Government.

Certain sections of the Bill are most objectionable. The thinking and logic of these sections seem to be borrowed from a dictatorial regime. Certainly the ideas in some of these sections are not copied from a truly democratic form of Government and it is regrettable that an Irish Government should introduce these alien and dangerous precedents into Irish law.

Some of these have been mentioned by the previous speaker. In sections 2 and 3 the offences are defined but a noticeable exception is that a landlord who forces his way into a dwelling occupied by one of his tenants, thereby causing annoyance and damage, apparently is exempt from the provisions of section 2. Similarly under section 3 if a landlord breaks into the dwelling of one of his tenants, if he stays there and occupies the premises, he is not affected.

Section 4 is most objectionable because it brings within its scope very many people. For example, in the situation regarding Hume Street quoted by Deputy Fitzpatrick public statements were made by a responsible body, An Taisce, supporting the action of the people who were squatting. Under this section all those people— members of that body — could be guilty of an offence and regarded as criminals

In section 5 there is introduced one of these alien ideas where it appears that a person must prove his innocence. Our law usually presumes a person innocent until proved guilty but the reverse appears to be the case in section 5 and is a most objectionable section in that regard. In fact, the section itself does not make much sense because, to my mind, if a person has a bona fide claim to ownership of land or a vehicle he does not commit an offence if he believes he has a claim and acts accordingly. The thinking behind the section must have been borrowed from a dictatorial regime somewhere.

Another aspect of this Bill is that it does not differentiate between the various types of squatting. We in the Labour Party do not condone the action of people who crash the housing list. However, it is one thing to say that they should not do that and should be put out when they get in, but it is another thing altogether to bring all these unfortunate people within the term "criminals". In England where the problem of squatting has been fairly widespread in recent times they have dealt with it in a much better way. I have not the text of the British measure here but it does not contain any of the very objectionable features of this Bill. In England they have solved the problem of dealing with squatters and protecting the interests of property owners without finding it necessary to create a new class of criminals as we are doing under this measure. I suppose it is worth nothing, also, that that measure was introduced by Mr. Heath.

There is no apparent attempt under this Bill to classify the various types of squatters, to analyse their motives or their actions. Squatters have different motives for their actions. There are the protesters, for example, people protesting against the sentences imposed in English trials over the past 12 months. There are those people who occupy certain air line offices and the British Embassy. Their occupation is purely temporary and usually does not involve the use of force, force within the definition contained in this Bill, and in the normal sense it is something with which a responsible Government must deal.

There is the other type of squatter involved in the Hume Street and Pembroke Road occupations. It is possible that a certain degree of force would be used by the squatters in these cases. Generally the inconvenience caused by their action is slight but they can undoubtedly cause great inconvenience to, say, the occupier of the house. However, as we have seen in the Pembroke Road case, this problem can be overcome by the existing process of the law.

Then there are the homeless people who occupy the vacant premises. In practically all cases these people are victims of the housing crisis, victims of the lack of Government policy, the lack of Government action in regard to housing. These, too, are in a different class from the other two types of squatters I have mentioned. Their only concern is to provide shelter for themselves and their families. It may be necessary to provide a certain amount of force or to give a certain amount of power to the owner of the property to eject these squatters, but certainly there is no justification for calling them criminals or for making criminals out of them, because their only crime is to provide accommodation for themselves and their families, and the owner can get back his property without going to the lengths provided in this Bill.

Here again we are saying the homeless person is liable to be fined as well as being liable to be ejected from where he squats. It may be necessary to give power to eject such a person but to go further and to fine him, to imprison him, to make a criminal out of him, this is something to which we object very strongly. When that person gets out of prison or out of court after being fined he is still homeless. If he goes back into the same place, again he is ejected; there is a heavier fine and a longer term of imprisonment. Every time he tries to provide shelter for himself the penalties become heavier and heavier.

The penalties under this measure, in the main, will apply to homeless people, out-of-work people who have not got the means or the money to help themselves. Having regard to Article 41 of our Constitution relative to the place of the family in the life of this country, most sections if not the whole of this Bill should be re-examined. Under the Constitution the State guarantees to protect the family, but in this Bill he does quite the opposite.

It must be remembered that the vast majority of these homeless squatters are married people with families. I do not want to be misinterpreted in this matter. People can say that such squatters do other people out of houses and all that. That is so because, as I have said, the Government have not provided sufficient houses. I am not objecting to is the fact that we are now to put these people out. What I am objecting to is the fact that we are now making criminals out of them. There is already a provision in the 1970 Housing Act to take care of squatting in local authority housing, and I think either one or other of these provisions should be removed from the Statute Book.

There is another significant omission from the Bill in that there still remains the right of the owner, as we have seen in Hume Street forcibly to eject squatters and to use violence. The Minister referred to violence. We are all aware of the kind of violence that was used in Hume Street by the landlord in that case against the squatters. I do not think people should be encouraged by public policy to take the law into their own hands. This is bad. It is a very significant omission from this Bill that a landlord is still free to use whatever physical violence he wishes to eject squatters and apparently he has the legal right to use this physical force to get his premises vacated. There is nothing in this Bill that limits the physical force which a landlord may use.

It appears from what I have said on this so far that this Bill is very unsatisfactory; it is not required at this point in time; it has been seen that existing legislation is adequate to deal with the problems in this area and that there are new precedents being created in this legislation which are completely alien to the Irish people. There are even certain sections, particularly section 5, which are in many ways comparable to section 15 or section 19 of the offences Against the State Act, 1939. Section 15 (5) of the Offences Against the State Act, 1939, reads:

In any prosecution under this section the burden of proof that any act was authorised under this section shall lie on the person prosecuted.

Section 19 of the same Act contains a similar provision which states that the charge itself carries a presumption of guilt on the part of the accused. Section 5 of the Bill before the House also carries that presumption of guilt and the accused must prove his innocence and there is no obligation on the prosecution to prove guilt.

Mr. O'Malley

This is completely wrong. I do not like to interrupt the Deputy but he completely misunderstands the section. The section refers only to onus of proof—there is no mention of conviction in it at all— and onus of proof in relation to one matter which makes up the case.

Mr. Cooney

It could be the essential part of it. To that extent the Deputy is right.

Mr. Pattison

Yes, it could be the one and only thing that would convict. This is completely unnecessary. When I first read section 5 I thought I had misread it because I could not believe what I read but my initial fears have been confirmed.

Under section 9 a member of the Garda Síochána may arrest a person without warrant. Here again we are giving unnecessary power to the Garda Síochána in this day and age when the Force has not got sufficient numbers to cope with crime and we see crime increasing, particularly crime aimed at old people, due in the main to insufficient numbers in the Garda Síochána. We are now giving the Garda Síochána this extra duty which is one of the most objectionable parts of this Bill.

I have stated my views and the views of my party on this Bill. Other members of the party will expand on what I have said and add many things to what I have said about this Bill which gives power, in my opinion, to convict on hearsay, on rumour, even on suspicion. It is a Bill which gives power to bring charges against persons who are members of a particular organisation or group, people like members of An Taisce who made a statement in support of the Hume Street affair. I suppose we could also include the Minister's precedessor who wrote a letter supporting a tenant who had gone into a local authority house. I suppose if the Bill is made retrospective he will be dealt with under section 5.

I would ask the Minister to have another look at this Bill to see if it is really necessary, to examine his conscience or the conscience of the Government as to what basically prompted them to introduce this measure. I think everyone is agreed that it basically stems from the housing crisis particularly in the Dublin area. If there was no housing crisis there would be no Bill like this before us today. If there was confidence that the housing crisis would be solved in the near future this Bill would not have been rushed in here, would not have jumped the queue with the haste with which it did jump it. I would ask the Minister to stop and think about the people who are in the ordinary way law-abiding who will be accused as criminals if the provisions of this Bill as they stand at the moment are passed.

Mr. Gallagher

I find it a little bit sad at this stage of our affairs that, with all the laws that have been passed in this House, and all the legislation that is on the Statute Book, during the past three or four years we have found that there is inadequate protection for people to own and enjoy property and to prevent that property from being stolen from them, and that no authority is available to property owners to restore their property to them.

I was surprised, indeed, to find that this Bill had to be introduced to get over some of the anomalies that exist in the law. There is nothing at all ominous in this piece of legislation. It is being introduced to prevent and stop the illegal possession of property under the guise, either political or otherwise, of shortage. To say that a person without a home is legally entitled to steal possession of a home, and that he is not guilty and is not amenable to the law, is like saying that a hungry man can walk into a shop any day of the week and steal because he is hungry.

Dr. Browne

That is what Thomas Aquinas said he has a right to do. He said he had a right to steal if he was hungry.

Mr. Cooney

He was not a property speculator.

Mr. Gallagher

He was not. So long as we have law and order in the country we will refer the Deputy to the theologians and then to Thomas Aquinas. If we choose to live according to that concept we will have to have a completely new look inwardly and practice the charity that we would grant to others. Let us be careful when we go into the field of charity because, in this day and age, there is a diminution of it, and the passing back to the state of the function of looking after people and we, the people who preach charity, in our daily lives know very little about it.

We are a society regulated by laws and, so long as we are regulated by laws, they are there for the protection of people. This is the point I am coming to. This piece of legislation would not be necessary but for people who drift in from anywhere you like, as the fancy may take them, or who are brought in by groups for any purpose of theirs. They then take over because they have no shelter——

Dr. Browne

Most unreasonable.

Mr. Gallagher

——houses which they believe are unoccupied or not in use. Deputy Pattison said that the argument will be used that the occupation of corporation houses was not interfering with the rights of others who had waited years in poor living conditions and poor housing conditions, that these people were not, in fact, jumping the queue and looking after themselves. It is all right to argue that if a local authority do not provide adequate houses and a pool of houses. You must not only provide sufficient houses to meet the daily needs but you must also provide for these people who drift in without any regulation, any transfer, or anything, with a wife and child or two children and expect to be housed immediately.

To meet this need in an urban area would call not only for full housing for those who live in the city or town but also a pool of houses, a rest centre for those who on some fancy of their own might decide that Cork was not the place where they wanted to live and that Dublin would be nice. You find this movement between urban areas and from the country to the city. So long as you do, and so long as you have full employment, so long will you have housing problems and housing needs. These are the growth signs of a lively society. It is when we reverse this growth and have a standstill position or a falling back that the problem is solved easily enough because the housing units will be available in that area or in that country. People will have moved out to where they may find better conditions or employment. Wherever you have this growth you will have these problems. They are not peculiar to Dublin and they are not peculiar to Ireland. That does not mean that these people who come in can take the law into their own hands no matter what the personal pressures on them are.

The property of people in this city and, indeed, throughout the country has been invaded and taken over. Heretofore it was possible to get a garda and say: "This is my property. Remove that person. He has no right to be here." Out of that grew the development that you could not do that. You would have to get him off yourself. It was not the garda's duty and you had to get him off as best you could.

I see a dangerous position in this state of affairs. Deputy Cooney can well see the development of the position where a house owner or a property owner has to go to a solicitor and start proceedings in court, and go as far as the steps of the court, if you like. We all know the frustration and danger that can ensue for people who have not got money. It is all right to say that people who have money can afford to spend it, but what about people who have not? I can assure the House that people may well be forced to take action on their own. either a knife, or a gun, or a hay knife, or some other weapon, in sheer frustration because they cannot get a person off their property.

In that respect alone there was a danger that there would be continuing breaches of the law and that, if this were allowed to continue when this weakness was discovered, it could lead to violence and a breakdown of law and order in our society. I cannot see anything in this Bill about which anyone can complain. It sets out a method by which the law can be invoked to move a person off some premises where he has no right to be with no legal ownership in the premises and unable to establish any legal ownership in the premises. For that reason alone this Bill fills a void in our legislation and should be on the Statute Book.

There are too many clever people today who are testing the law to find out how far they can go. When they find there is no reaction from the law and that they can break the law, they carry on and do so. This type of baiting is going on all the time. We are fast approaching a state in this country, and in other countries too, where ordinary law enforcement officers are not too sure that the laws they read and seek to act under are either constitutional or able to stand up in court, with the result that very often they can be browbeaten, if you like, by an eloquent speaker in the street or somewhere else. They are often told to stay out of it.

It is time we spelled out the law in a simple manner so that a person can enjoy the ownership of his own property and he can in a simple way prove he has the right to tenancy, ownership or actual full ownership of it and that any person found on that property without permission, reason or right should be removed and removed quickly.

I see nothing wrong with this type of legislation. As a matter of fact, I see the positive side to it. It will save people from getting into serious trouble. By "people" I mean ordinary people who believe their rights are guaranteed under the Constitution. There are many aspects to the law. If the owner of the property which these people entered by deliberately breaking the law were to use the same force to get these people out as they used to enter there would be serious breaches of the peace up and down the country.

Deputy Pattison mentioned landlords but it is not so much landlords we are talking about here as ordinary people who own a house. They are not engaged in the renting of houses or in the building of houses for renting; they are merely the owners of a property. If that property becomes vacant for one reason or another they may suddenly find it is occupied. If they ask the people to leave and they will not leave they may go along to their solicitor but, on the other hand, they may not, They must go along to the guards but the guards cannot put them out. The owner is an ordinary peaceful citizen who saved up his money and bought a house and he is the person we are really concerned with here.

There is also the danger of corporation houses being occupied and here the system of rehousing people may break down completely because of people who jump the queue and set themselves up in homes before anybody else. If this sort of thing were to continue without being controlled everyone would do likewise.

The main reason why this Bill is being introduced is to bring some order into an area where a weakness has been found and for that reason alone it is welcome. The squatting by preservationists in Stephen's Green is a different thing altogether. I hope the right of protest will never be fully and completely extinguished. The only progress society can hope for will come from protest. We are not dealing with this kind of thing good, bad or indifferent; all that is sought in this Bill is the preservation of people's rights. The idea of withdrawing people's rights is far from the Minister's mind or the Government's mind.

I welcome this measure, which might be just in time, but may be a little late. The fact that it impedes the activities of political groups of one form or another who attract attention to their own aims and ideals, which on full investigation and examination hold forth no great hope for the masses, means that it is doing a good job. If this Bill protects the rights of the citizens under the Constitution, as it has all the appearance of doing, then I welcome it.

Mr. Cooney

No one could disagree with the Minister when he says that squatting is a problem. We would have to be blind and deaf if we did not realise it was a problem. We must, however, take issue with the Minister in his proposed solution of it. His solution is to create three new criminal offences as stated in sections 2,3, and 4. We should examine the problem that has to be solved and see if it merits being solved through the medium of the criminal law.

In his statement the Minister refers to the people who create this problem as "quasi political groups". He also speaks about the type of intimidatory exercises which have come to be known as fish-ins. If we examine those people who have squatted over the last couple of years we see that by and large they were homeless people. The initiative to go squatting might have come from these groups known as "quasi political groups" but the reason squatting occured at all was that deserving people were homeless. In other words, a serious social evil was at the root of the squatting. I cannot see how a Government in their right senses can hope to solve a social evil by making criminal offences out of that social problem.

The Minister used emotive language in my view when he described fish-ins as intimidatory exercises. We all know they have taken place. Having read about these fish-ins in the press I was inclined to look askance at them, until I had occasion to campaign in the Finn Valley in Donegal during the recent by-election there. I canvassed every house in the Finn Valley west of Ballybofey. The Minister was in that area too and I know that Senators and Deputies in the Minister's party also canvassed all the houses in that area. I knew at the time that the Minister's party would get the majority of votes from the houses in that area. The point I want to make is that right through that area runs the Finn river and the tributaries to it. It is quite a famous sporting river but for a length of 15 miles not one of those people whom I, the Minister and his supporters were canvassing is entitled to throw a fishing rod into the river. Having seen the appalling injustice there, my views on fish-ins have changed. Fish-ins are an expression of a social evil. People are being deprived of their just rights and the protests that have taken place in support of those rights do not to my mind warrant the type of offence that this Bill creates.

It is ironical and shameful that the last time trespass—because that is what is involved here — was made a criminal offence was in the Summary Jurisdiction Act of 1851 when it was the answer of the Government in the Castle to the lawful protest of the small Irish tenant farmers who tried to become masters of their own destiny. We are now in 1971 and 120 years later we are introducing repressive legislation to make another type of trespass a criminal offence, a type of trespass which also springs from social evils in our society, in the same way as the trespass by those Irish farmers was caused by the social evil of landlordism. Very often in the present situation it is landlordism, landlordism in the guise of the property speculator which is giving rise to this trouble. Deputy Gallagher was eloquent and nearly emotional when he talked about these squatters stealing possession of a home. That has not happened yet. He talked about a poor man who would be unable to call on the mechanics of the law to restore his home to him.

That is not what squatting has been here so far. Individual homes have not been threatened. Squatting has taken place in, for example, empty houses in Pembroke Road, houses bought one by one by the property speculator until such time as he has a row of perfectly good houses which he can knock down and replace with an office block. That is the type of landlordism which is causing this social evil and provoking squatting. Squatting has also taken place in corporation flats. That does an injustice to the small man because it interferes with priorities on the housing list. That type of squatting must be stopped and powers were given by this House in the Housing Act of 1970 to put an end to that type of squatting. The Minister referred to that in his speech. I submit that the powers given in that Act are quite sufficient to restrain and prevent any injustice done to anybody by squatting in corporation premises.

The other squatting that took place was that connected with the notorious events in Hume Street. It would now appear from what has happened that the squatters were right. It cannot be that much of an offence if ultimately the people who committed it are proved to be right. Again, we have to consider the people whose property is interfered with; I will not go so far as to say whose rights were injured. These were empty houses awaiting demolition. Again, they were the property of a development company and I do not think that the harm done to the property rights of that development company justified any Irish Government introducing a Bill to create a new criminal offence. It is a sad day to see criminal offences created to deal with this problem.

Deputy Gallagher admitted it would be a poor day that would see the extinguishment of protest. Significantly, what he said was it would be a poor day to see the full and complete extinguishment of protest. One must deduce from that that he is agreeable to protest being stifled to carefully controlled and suitably acceptable protest. But protest, by definition, must be free. I think he was quite wrong in making protest a conditional thing. Protest is proper when it is within the law. This is where we come to this problem here because these squatting protests are technically outside the law but the law they are outside is the law of property and there has always been a legal remedy for any infringement of the rights of property and the remedy has been through the civil courts by means of ejectment, in order to obtain possession, or by an action for trespass. These remedies are still available to any party whose property may be subject to squatting.

When we consider the squatting that has taken place to date the parties against whom it took place are well able, both in terms of finance and knowledge, to arm themselves to get into court and get their remedy there. Quite justifiably these people can come back to us and say that the remedy is too clumsy. As a lawyer, I know well the cumbersome procedures that have to be gone through before a property owner can secure an eviction from his property, but these procedures are cumbersome purely because the machinery is antiquated and old fashioned. If the present civil law relating to ejectment and trespass were to be revised, overhauled, made efficient and speedy, and if the jurisdiction of the district court were to be increased in ejectment and process, as I understand it is to be increased in tort and contract, and if the machinery were streamlined, there would be no need for this obnoxious Bill creating new criminal offences.

In Britain, where the problem is more complex and more widespread, and where there are quasi political groups by the score, the Government have not found it necessary to create new criminal offences. They have streamlined the law of ejectment and this has proved adequate to meet the nuisance. If the same were done here, property owners, if they wanted to, could invoke a speedy civil remedy and secure possession of their property. Indeed, the Minister in his statement and in the Bill recognises that the only question at issue is the restoration of possession to the lawful owner, owner meaning occupier as well as owner in the strict sense of the word. Section 2 says that a person who forcibly enters on land but does not interfere with it and subsequently leaves it commits no offence.

The Minister in his own statement mentions the example of the wandering minstrel sleeping in a disused outhouse. We have the example of the wandering family—husband and pregnant wife— occupying a stable. These people, if they wander into premises, commit no offence provided they leave the premises ultimately. It is quite clear the Minister recognises the kernel of the problem is the failure on the part of the squatters to leave. Surely, if a system can be devised to ensure that they leave peaceably the problem is solved. If they refuse to leave they can be made to leave if, as I say, the civil remedy is updated and streamlined. There is no need then to create a criminal offence.

The Minister said:

This Bill has been framed on the basis that the sanction of the criminal law should not be invoked as a substitute for civil action against trespass...

That is precisely what this Bill does, invokes sanction of the criminal law for civil action. I cannot understand the mentality of a Government prepared to allow a piece of oppressive legislation, which they admit is a criminal sanction to remedy a civil law, and prepared to tolerate this particular approach when they know it is essentially a civil wrong that is at stake which could be remedied by a civil remedy provided that remedy is streamlined. It does not need legislation. It can be done by updating the procedure. All that is necessary is to convene the Rules Committee, let them revise the rules and lay the revised rules before the House; that will streamline the procedure. There is no need for an expensive Act of Parliament.

This Bill is indiscriminate in its application. It must necessarily be so. The case has been made that it is designed to deal with the quasi-political groups and the political squatter, the intimidator, but no such distinction is drawn in the Bill and, therefore, it must be indiscriminate in its application and it must hit the genuine as well as the poseur and the "scruffies". The Minister recognises this. He said in his opening speech:

What about the minority of cases in which there is a colour of right? We are not talking about legal right. There is a colour of moral right in the case of a person wandering the streets, homeless; surely that person should not be put in gaol because he takes shelter in an empty house belonging to a property speculator. It seems to me we have come a long way from 1916 and the Proclamation and a long way from 1851, the last time trespass was made a criminal offence by an Act of Westminister. Prior to that, the last time forcible entry was a criminal offence was in 1402 and then it dealt with forcible entry by a landlord to eject a tenant. Here we are in the enlightened age of 1971 creating three new offences to stamp out a social evil. I cannot understand the mentality of a Government of a free republic that will not streamline civil law and then exhaust the remedies of the civil law and if they are inefficient or inadequate then come to the House with a piece of criminal legislation.

The whole tenor of the Bill is to create a precedent. The onus of proof is shifted from the prosecution in what could be a most important matter, proof of ownership. Wherever you see the onus of proof being shifted to the defence, that is to my mind impinging on the principle that no man is guilty until proved guilty. That should be avoided if at all possible in legislation.

Although it is guarded with substantial conditions the Bill introduces the power for a member of the Garda to arrest without warrant, something that should be used extremely sparingly. It is, I think, a hastily drafted Bill. Section 2 says that a person who forcibly enters land or a vehicle shall be guilty of an offence unless he is the owner of the land or vehicle or, if he is not the owner, he does not interfere with the use and enjoyment of the land or vehicle. But by definition, if he enters into another's property, he is trespassing and trespass itself is automatic interference with use and enjoyment. That is shoddy drafting. These matters can be tackled in Committee, if it comes to that Stage, but I appeal to the Minister not to come to the House to solve a social problem by creating a new criminal offence. Solve it under the civil law as it has been solved for centuries past. Do not ask this House to pass legislation making trespass a criminal offence when the last piece of such legislation was passed by Westminister in order to intimidate and make criminals of our forefathers.

In his statement and in the Bill the Minister acknowledges that the kernel of the problem is to get clear possession for the owner and nobody can deny that desire. Under our law and Constitution the property owner is entitled to clear possession of his property. We should be anxious to ensure that he gets it but gets it within the realms of the civil law. The Minister recognises that restoration of possession is the kernel of the problem and section 2 (b) of the Bill also recognises that. I appeal to the Minister not to proceed with this Bill but to streamline the civil law and give people the remedy there.

Dr. Browne

This Bill must be taken in the context of the strange sensitivity apparent in the Government in recent months to protests of various kinds. This seems to be a particularly petulant, grossly over-reactive response to a negligible problem. In its very severe penal clauses it is symptomatic of the pattern of over-reaction shown by the Government as if they felt particularly insecure. This Government have been in office for 15 or 20 years, a pretty long time, but are they a Government that are so insecure that they must, at every sign of protest, react as they have done in recent months, in the past 12 or 18 months in particular?

We had the threat of the appalling proposals in the Criminal Justice Bill; then a couple of months ago we had the threat of internment without trial and now we have the threat of six months in jail and increasing sentences if the protest continues. Surely a Government that have a real sense of their own security do not have to reach for their jailers in order to deal with problems of this kind? I am particularly indebted to Deputy Cooney for his contribution as a lawyer. It seems extraordinary that the Minister cannot accept the very much more civilised proposal put forward by Deputy Cooney that there is a simple remedy for this problem by streamlining the process of law in a civil action. This heavy-handed threat of jail made in circumstances like these is completely unwarranted especially as it was accompanied by a pretentious and sententious homily from the Minister in his opening speech on the freedoms and rights of individuals and their right to voice grievances.

As other Deputies have said, this is a completely unwarranted method of dealing with a problem created by the continual failure of the Government to deal with the housing problem and to recognise that there is a very damaging threat to the amenities, the aesthetic values of our larger cities and towns by the property speculator. There are large areas of the country in which, as Deputy Cooney said, people are living on the banks of fish-filled rivers and lakes and they may not take the fish out of them because they must be held intact for our visitors from France, Germany, Sweden, Britain, or our wealthier fellow Irishmen from Dublin who go down to the west, the south, the midlands or the north of the country.

Deputy Gallagher, like the Minister, gave us a lecture on the rights of private property. Everybody knows my views about the rights of the private property but even if we accept their views on the rights of the individual under the Constitution, or the sacro-sanctity of his right to preserve and protect whatever property he may hold, there are others who also have very much more important rights under the Constitution. These rights have been denied to those people by the Government. The right of the individual to rear his family in conditions of reasonable security in a healthy home and background has been denied by the Government and is being denied by the Government to thousands and thousands of men, women and children.

The Minister tried to minimise the seriousness of this problem and he says that all countries have this problem. All countries have this problem but not to the extent that we have it. What is worse, most of these countries, particularly the European countries, have at least the explanation or the excuse that they suffered such widespread war damage that their rehousing problem is and has been an infinitely greater problem than the problem faced by the Fianna Fáil Government over the years when they had a majority here and responsibility for the provision of houses. It is to the resolution of that problem that the Fianna Fáil Government should turn their attention, the provision of houses for the unfortunate people now living in grossly overcrowded conditions, when they can get accommodation at all.

I do not know if the Minister ever paid a visit to Griffith Barracks when the unfortunate people were living there — a wife and children living in the barracks and the unfortunate husband living wherever he could and being pitched out in the evening at six o'clock. I do not care if there were only two families in Griffith Barracks; until their needs are answered the Government have betrayed their responsibility to our fellow citizens in our community. How could that unfortunate family, the husband here and the wife there, how could that kind of a marriage be expected to survive that sort of stress? How could those unfortunate children be expected to grow up into anything but emotionally disturbed children in such a set of circumstances? Those are not exceptional situations. Any of us who do constituency work know well of the enormous number of people living in grossly overcrowded conditions.

The Government have had the authority, they have had the money, they had all the power they needed in order to end that problem and they have not done so and the protest moves are a direct response to that reality in our society. It is no good locking up these people. It is no good putting these people in jail. Were I, a father of a family, homeless with my wife and children, and I was wandering the streets and I saw luxury hotels being built, luxury blocks of flats being built, bank offices for bankers, and new insurance buildings and, probably most offensive insult of all to these unfortunate people, £1,000,000 being spent on a luxury playground at Leopardstown, on a racecourse, while I was denied my right to a home, a house, a roof over my head for myself and my family, then by God I would protest in any way I could and I feel I would be justified in making that protest.

The Government seem to be completely unaware of the magnitude of their failure in this regard and the insolence of this approach to the solution of that problem — I wanted bread and you gave me a stone. The Minister talked about the difficulty of finding finance. I have made this point many times in this House: every single one of you there at different times has said "we cannot build schools, we have not enough money to build universities, we cannot give the old any more, we cannot give better scholarships, we cannot provide better health services and now we cannot provide houses, or communications, or whatever it is, because we have not got the money." Why have you not got the money? Do you not tell us time and time again that the social and economic systems in which you believe are the correct social and economic systems and that they are systems which will bring prosperity to our country and give us the money to do all these things? Why do you continue to keep faith in these social and economic systems? Why can the Minister not take his own advice when he says that "human progress can be measured by the extent of man's questioning of himself and his environment and his willingness to adopt new concepts when the old ones have proved inadequate or unsuitable." Why can he not take his own advice and accept that the economic attitude followed by the Government over the years has failed completely to provide the wealth in the amount needed to solve all these problems?

It is not the function of capital, private enterprise capital, to provide the wealth to do this kind of thing for the average masses of the people. That, of course, is why I am a socialist. The right to protest, Deputy Gallagher will concede, as Deputy Cooney pointed out, in effect as long as it is not effective protest. Quite clearly, the right to protest has a very honourable record in our history from the GPO to the Four Courts and right through. When we wanted to protest against injustice, and particularly the injustice of the landlord, or the wealthy few in our society, we have found in the past occupation and squatting to be a particularly effective method of publicising a grievance, publicising a grievance so that something is, in fact, done about it.

The astonishing thing is that this Bill has been introduced at all. The Minister says it so happens that just at the moment we are in a period of relative quite so far as the particular problem with which the Bill is designed to deal is concerned. Does he think that this is simply a coincidence? Why is there a period of relative quiet? If there is a period of quiet, why try to rush this piece of repressive legislation through the House? Surely everything is there to show that the reason there is a period of quiet is that the existing system of civil law — inefficient as it is, as Deputy Cooney has pointed out—is still sufficiently efficient to deal adequately with what is a completely negligible problem? Nobody is squatting anywhere at the present time and it appears nobody can make any sign of dissent whatever against the present Fianna Fáil Government without the Minister for Justice reaching for his handcuffs.

We know it is possible to so modernise the existing civil law that this matter can be dealt with without any great difficulty. The problem is simply the right of ejectment. Under civil law the aggrieved person if he wants can get an ejectment order. Deputy Gallagher sought to create the impression that the houses in Pembroke Street, in Hume Street or in Mountjoy Square — the houses in which people usually squat—are owned by small-holders. The absolute absurdity of that proposition is so self-evident that it does not require any emphasis whatever. Deputy Gallagher, understandably, is speaking for the big property owners. All his sympathy is with them, to preserve their rights, but he showed little or no concern for the rights of the unfortunate individual who chooses to squat.

Personally, I have opposed squatting for a completely different reason — the type of squatting that is being carried out — because I have always thought of the whole terrifying experience which must ensue for the unfortunate wife. I am all for men squatting; if they wish to squat good luck to them, but I have felt that the women and children in particular should not be in the front line of this struggle against landlordism, the struggle against the speculative builder and against the incompetence of the Fianna Fáil Government which leaves these unfortunate people no other choice.

It should not be forgotten that the unfortunate women who have to squat in houses do not do so for the adventure but simply because they have no other place to go. Anyone would think when listening to the Minister and to Deputy Gallagher that it was a sort of summer Sunday picnic to squat. In fact, they cut off the lights, they cut off the water supply, usually there are no sanitary arrangements and the unfortunate lady cannot leave the house. Her husband goes out to work but she cannot leave to do shopping because she is afraid when she returns the house will be occupied by the people who are taking it over. The family live in continual terror. That is correct; I am not exaggerating, particularly where the children are concerned. There is the battering on the door, the smashing of the windows and then the forcible ejectment which we saw used in Hume Street and Pembroke Street.

It is like these people who lecture the unfortunate man who must go on strike, as if it were fun being on strike pay and walking up and down in all weathers. Squatting is uncomfortable, unpleasent, frequently dangerous and apparently essential for some people. It is a tragic commentary on the failure of the Government that it should be essential for somebody to squat in a disused tenement.

The Minister denies the principle of guilt by association. Of course, there is this element of guilt by association. Both Deputy FitzGerald and myself would have done our six months in jail for the Hume Street affair——

Dr. FitzGerald

Three years.

Dr. Browne

——because we got up. I certainly would not have repudiated the activity at that time. In the event the squatters and those of us who supported them were accepted as having taken the correct line. I am not primarily concerned for the preservation movement—I am more concerned for the homeless movement — but for what it is worth would Hume Street have been preserved were it not for the action of the squatters and those who supported them?

The whole tenor of this Bill is completely fascist. The hand that drafted this is the hand that drafted the iniquitous provisions of the Criminal Justice Bill, the gradual eating-away of our fundamental freedoms on one pretence or another. There is arrogant insolence in the Minister's introductory statement: "If the foundations of democracy are liberty and order, let us not forget that without order there can be no liberty". That is taken verbatim from the works of the late Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Salazar. All of these people had order but how much liberty did they have? If you want that order, abolish this place and run it as a dictatorship. While telling us he is preserving our liberty the Minister tells us that if we are charged with an offence we have to prove ourselves innocent. In effect, that is what he is doing. This is a complete reversal of the elementary process of law, of the responsibility of the State to prove guilt and to regard the individual as innocent until he has been proved to be guilty.

It is an absurd proposition, a conflict of ideas, first of all, that the individual must dissociate himself from the contents of a statement if a statement is made on behalf of a group supporting a particular action; show that the statement was made without his knowledge, that the statement was made without his consent. Why should a citizen of the State be put to the trouble of dissociating himself from a statement made or proving that a statement was made without his consent or that a statement was made without his knowledge? Surely the onus is on the State to prove all of these things rather than the other way around. That is section 4.

Section 5 says:

...it shall not be necessary for the prosecution to prove ownership of the land or vehicle.

The onus is on the unfortunate defendant to exculpate himself, to extricate himself from a dilemma created for him by this kind of legislation. Then there is the iniquitous proposal that a garda has the right to arrest a person without a warrant. The Minister tries to cover himself by saying that the four conditions in subsections (a), (b), (c) and (d) of section 9 must all be honoured before the garda can act. None of these conditions are serious safeguards because they all represent the opinion of an individual: "Reasonable cause for suspecting", "the owner of the land reasonably believes". Who is to decide he is unreasonable? In this House in recent months there have been many people who reasonably believed various things about their colleagues and who were later shown to have been most unreasonable in their beliefs when this matter came before judge and jury in the courts. Subsection (c) says:

...the member proposing to make the arrest reasonably believes that the arrest is necessary...

This is all so much dishonest window dressing: "and it is not reasonably practical to apply for a warrant". There is no difficulty there at all. If a garda decides he wants to arrest somebody all he has to say is: "I have fulfilled all of the four conditions" because it is merely a matter of arrest on suspicion. There is no attempt to define subsection (b) which says:

...the lawful right of the owner in relation thereto, or serious inconvenience to the public or a section thereof...

What is "a section thereof"? Two people are a section thereof, the garda and the man who is making the complaint, two people plus the garda. This is a piece of police state legislation. As Deputy Cooney pointed out, it is completely unnecessary. It is inexplicable to us in the Labour Party that it should have been introduced, particularly since it is known that relatively minor improvements in the existing civil law procedures could provide for the power of ejectment, which is the main power sought in this Bill.

The unfortunate people, the husband and wife and children, who take shelter will be forgiven apparently, according to the Minister's unctuous opening statement, if they get off the premises. How very accommodating of the State to forgive them if they leave a derelict tenement house, outhouse or stable in order that Deputy Gallagher's property owning friends can get back their property, tear it down, put up in its place an insurance block, an office block, a luxury hotel or luxury flats and make a small fortune out of the results? If the man and his wife and children leave quietly, showing due humility and penitence for the crime they have committed, seeking shelter for themselves from the streets and the weather, they are forgiven by the benevolent State under Deputy O'Malley.

This is another manifestation of the crude, inept solutions provided by Fianna Fáil for their failure to deal with important fundamental issues in our society, the most fundamental of all, the right of the individual to provide a home for his family. It is a thoroughly shameful piece of legislation. It will be opposed by the Labour Party and if there were any shame in the Fianna Fáil Party it would also be opposed by them.

Mr. Dowling

At the outset I should like to comment on a number of matters which have been raised, so that my views would be fully known. I have no desire to assist in any way the cad called a landlord who, as Deputy Dr. Browne indicated, fuses the lights, cuts off the water supply, terrorises the tenants, locks out the tenants, intimidates the tenants, in order to get more and more rent. There is this type of individual who looks for the last drop of blood from the tenants. I have no desire to interfere with any measure that would be applied to this man and I hope the Minister will in due course pay the same attention to this particular type of individual.

Dr. Browne

Hear, hear.

Mr. Dowling

I do not want to protect speculators, people who are soaking the public or holding up local authority building as a result of seeking more and more money but I certainly have great sympathy for the people on the Dublin Corporation waiting list. I am mainly concerned about people who are unable to help themselves, people such as those on that waiting list. I have sympathy for those people. Housing is a separate matter and one we can discuss in this House at any time. We can show that we have a creditable record on this score. More houses are needed. I hope more houses will be built. I am sure they will until such time as the demand is met. There are many factors which brought about the greater demand for better and more accommodation but this is another day's work.

In order to deal with the situation now before the House I just want to say that we have people who shout loudly about rights but not a word about responsibility. It would be a sad day for us if we in this House were to yield to organised mob law or organised hi-jackers, some of them directed from outside the State to take possession of accommodation and so deprive the people on the Dublin Corporation waiting list and the waiting lists of other local authorities of homes. Organised groups have endeavoured to take over and are now exerting pressure on certain individuals in this House, and individuals are yielding to pressure, and it will be seen, before this Bill finally goes through the House, who the people are who will yield to the pressure of the organised mob endeavouring to intimidate responsible people.

The law-abiding citizen has no need to worry if he does not break the law and the vast majority of people in this city are law-abiding citizens. There is but a small group who are prepared to occupy premises and houses that should be going to people in dire need of housing accommodation. The Minister has mentioned fish-ins but I want to refer to the kick-ins that have taken place when mobs patrolled the housing estates of this city and when they saw a vacant house they would ask: "Will we kick in this door?" The kick-in was followed by sleep-ins and by fish-ins and a whole lot of other types of ins in these houses. Many people in my constituency, in Ballyfermot and Crumlin, newly-weds and other people on the waiting list, were deprived of accommodation because houses were occupied for prolonged periods by squatters and these people have now lost their rightful place on the waiting list because of the build-up that came during that period. These people are now forced to live in overcrowded conditions because of this build-up that has occurred as a result of the mob law and the pressure groups that forced this type of organised squatting.

We saw, not so long ago, an organised group trying to prevent the demolition of stables in Sarah Place. If one takes the bus to Sarah Place now he can see the wonderful flats that have been built there by the corporation and the happy homes that are there at present. These people who tried to prevent the demolition are the very same people who dished out lists of pending vacancies and actual vacancies and directed people from public houses and elsewhere to where they could break in and squat. They have no regard for the people on the waiting list who have taken their places over the years. These are the people about whom I am concerned and if this Bill will remedy the situation and ensure that people on the waiting list, some of whom have waited for years, will get accommodation and that no group of individuals, however powerful, whether they are directed from outside or inside, will have any place in this society and that the law will be able to deal with them swiftly and adequately—if this Bill will ensure that, it has my full support.

We all know the type of thing that occurred during the squatting period. In one case a house was occupied during a wake. The squatters moved in during the wake and did not move out after the corpse. On another occasion the squatters moved in when an old woman was in hospital and threw out her furniture. The guards came but were powerless to deal with the situation. This is no laughing matter. This can be verified if any Deputy wants to verify it. This is no sob story. This actually happened. On other occasions people have been afraid to take accommodation when squatters were evicted because of the pressure that built up in flats by the relatives and other people connected with the person evicted. They intimidated people and deprived them of their rightful place on the waiting list. We cannot support outside agitators or groups who are endeavouring to ensure that people are deprived of a home.

There is also the question of the cost. Doors have been kicked in and the whole interior of flats and houses has been rooted out and anything of value sold. The filth left behind in some of these places was appalling. The ratepayers and taxpayers must pay for this destruction. Are we to protect the type of individual who will break in and break up the accommodation of the local authority? Are we to ensure that legislation will not be implemented to deal with this particular type of individual? If this legislation is not tough enough then it should be tough enough to deal with that type of person who will damage public property which you and I and the corporation tenants and taxpayers and ratepayers of this city must pay for.

We know these people are very highly organised. They extracted the lists of people who were lucky enough to draw houses in the local authority draws and paid visits to the houses and got information on when they would be leaving their accommodation to take up their new residence. They passed this on, sometimes at a price, to people who paid this group of agitators key money in order to get accommodation. Key money changed hands on many occasions. These people organised the unfortunate people and assured them of support if and when the corporation attempted to evict them. This is the sort of situation that must be dealt with effectively, efficiently and as quickly as possible. In the past a man in this city named Dennehy went to prison because he could not get accommodation from the corporation and he squatted but when he was offered accommodation by the corporation Mr. Dennehy did not accept it. This is the type of individual who was a front and set up by outside interests to develop a situation in this country, which they successfully did to a degree.

Those of us who are acquainted with the local authority here in Dublin city are well aware of the problems that presented themselves to Dublin Corporation. I fear, however, that the officials of Dublin Corporation or the personnel in dealing with the squatting situation at that time were weak-kneed in their approach and possibly allowed the situation to develop to such a degree that it became uncontrollable. I hope that situation will never arise again. I am quite sure that this type of legislation will ensure that it will not happen again and that weak-kneed administrations will not be called upon to deal with a situation that can be dealt with adequately by the law.

If it is the desire of the Opposition to support this type of group, or the types of individuals we have seen and who were common in this city for many months in the not too distant past, and if it is the desire of the Opposition to ensure that legislation of this type is impeded so that these people can have a free run any time they so desire, another day will come when the citizens of this city will have their say and I am quite sure that they will deal with the Opposition adequately.

I would agree with some of the sentiments expressed by all speakers here tonight. I said I was mainly concerned about the local authority situation and about the people who had a rightful place on the waiting list and who waited for a considerable period for accommodation and were then deprived of it by the mobs who roamed this city, as I said before, some of them directed by outside sources and some of them financed by outside sources. I do not want to be associated in any way with the landlord I mentioned earlier who puts the squeeze on in order to extract the last copper from the unfortunate tenant. I hope the Minister will turn his attention to this individual who has caused so much mental torture to so many people in this city by putting the screws on and twisting them tighter and tighter in order to extract the last copper. I am not standing up here to defend this man and neither am I defending the speculators who want to extract the last copper from the people in general.

Dr. FitzGerald

I should like at the outset to make it clear that the remarks I propose to make on this Bill represent my own viewpoint. I understand that Deputy Fitzpatrick when speaking earlier expressed serious criticisms of many clauses in this Bill and suggested that many amendments would be required. My own position is that I think the Bill is unsuitable and unacceptable as a whole. In that respect my position perhaps differs in degree, at any rate, from his.

Reading through the Minister's speech, as I did not have the opportunity of hearing it, being on another body in this House at that time, I am struck by the number of things in it which are questionable or dubious as regards their truth or accuracy and in the latter part of it by the number of clichés packed into a relatively small amount of space.

At the outset he started off by saying — and this is a cliché and also something which is simply not true:

That, I am afraid, is not entirely true because this Government, by an action they took some time ago, deprived the people of this city of their rights in a way that prejudiced their rights permanently, not temporarily. The people of this city had a corporation and that corporation had the power which it exercised in the Mountpleasant Square case to overturn a decision of the Minister's, itself overturning a decision of the corporation. By the abolition of the corporation that power disappeared and the democratic rights of the people of Dublin were removed.

The Minister says that there is no problem and that changes in law and policy can be, and are, secured by democratic processes. They are, no doubt, in time but if we had waited for the democratic processes this Government destroyed to be reintroduced, the houses in Hume Street would have gone and been replaced by development totally unsuitable for this city and totally against the wishes of the people of this city. For a government who have taken away from us in this city these democratic processes to have the nerve to say something like that in a Ministerial speech leads me, on reading it, to feel that the rest of it is unlikely to be worthy of being taken very seriously.

There are the usual clichés then that this development by agitation "strikes at the very roots of our society". What is really striking at the roots of our society is not agitators and demonstrations — even though many of these are for causes that I personally do not support or accept, and many of them adopt tactics which I would not support or accept — but the Fianna Fáil Party and the way they have debased our processes of law and democracy in the interests of big business and in the interests of property developers.

This Bill which we are asked to take in this House tonight — why is it here? It is introduced to protect the rights of developers and to make criminals out of people who oppose developers demolishing property. I am not suggesting for a moment — and I will come back to this again in a few minutes — that developers have not got rights and that these rights must not be protected by the law. They are protected by the law and if that law is defective and a property developer who has a legitimate right to develop his property is unable to do so and is frustrated, then the law must be changed. If the civil processes which he has a right to use for this purpose are clogged up in some way, they should be reformed and I would support any such reform. I do not, however, support a proposal that people who oppose measures of this kind, introduced with a view to destroying parts of our city and using the deficiency in our democratic processes created by Fianna Fáil, should be made criminals.

Further on the Minister told us:

An unexceptional sentiment and, indeed, I would take that as the text for my speech because I stand on that principle and I am opposing this Bill. I am somewhat puzzled, however, as to how a Minister introducing the Bill could introduce that sentiment into it as it is precisely this principle that the Bill offends against. The Minister said:

The Bill will not, therefore, apply to incidents that arise in the course of private disputes between persons having different estates or interests in the same land... These are matters to be regulated only by existing civil property law.

I think he ought to expand on that. If this is, in fact, the case then the Bill is singularly badly drafted. I am not clear whether when he says that the Bill will not, therefore, apply to these incidents he means that he will not apply it and that he is offering us some guarantee that it will not be applied in certain cases or whether he is claiming that the wording of the Bill is such as to exclude the operation of the Bill in those cases. If it is the latter claim he is making, I should like to hear him on it because this is not evident to me on the face of the Bill, nor is it evident to the legal advisers who have looked at this Bill and on whose legal advice I am proceeding on this particular point.

The Minister went on to say:

When a person commits an offence of forcible entry or forcible occupation, it will, in the overwhelming majority of cases, be in circumstances where he has no colour of right to the property entered or occupied.

He does not explain how he comes to that conclusion. Forcible occupation means locking your door to stop somebody trying to get in who you think has no right to get in. I do not know how the Minister measures up the number of such cases as against the number of other cases where the person concerned has no colour of right. Then he goes on to say:

Consequently, it would in the ordinary way be unreasonable to the point of absurdity to require the prosecution to go through the tedious and possibly costly process of proving ownership that is not being challenged.

He has no qualms about making the occupier of the property go through this process. But a man, who has a claim of right, who is over-holding as a tenant, perhaps, who has sent in his rent and believes he has a right to be there and is expelled forcibly and violently by his landlord with or without the help of the police force mobilised for that purpose, has to prove his property right against the man in the stronger position, the landlord. It is unreasonable to put the weaker man in the position of having to prove his rights and put the stronger man into the position where the onus of proof is shifted away from him.

At the end of his speech the Minister managed to gather together — I do not blame him; he may not be responsible for the wording; it may be his advisers — a wonderful collection of clichés. He says, "The only city without a housing problem is a city that is a dead city or at least dying." How often has that cliché been trotted out before? He goes on to say: "The people who are most vociferous in their protests are rarely those in most urgent need." Sometimes that is less eloquently expressed, but it is another well-known cliché. He further states that the Government and the Oireachtas "has the duty to protect the rights and freedom of all citizens— not just the most noisy elements." Later on he says, "Protest and pressure for change are not in themselves bad." This is, I admit, a major concession for a Fianna Fáil Government. Perhaps we should congratulate them on it. He goes on to say that "although many of us disagree profoundly with the ideas of some who are at present seeking to change the existing order of things and although we may, with justification, suspect their motives, we can and must respect, and if necessary defend, their right to propound their ideas and to voice their dissatisfaction, provided that they for their part understand that the majority, too, have rights."

I am getting a little tired of hearing about the rights of the majority. This country may not have, in the terms that Northern Ireland have, permanent minorities and groups which are segregated by race, colour or religion and are permanently separated from the community and made a minority. But there are many minorities in this country and I do not see any great concern on the part of this Government to protect their rights. I see a continual process of undermining their rights. I am not sure that the majority, whether it be the Fianna Fáil majority in this Dáil or any other majority in this country, need their rights protected, because their rights are well protected. The problem we face is the inadequate protection of the rights of the minority.

So much for the Minister's speech. Let me come now to the Bill itself. I regard the Bill as wrong in principle and on a number of grounds, grounds which I regard as cogent to the point of being compelling. First of all, what is the origin of this Bill? What is the problem it purports to solve? Is it the problem of squatting in corporation property? No, because in this House last July we passed a Bill which dealt with that problem. I am not aware that the provisions of that measure have proved in any way to be inadequate. I regard them as dubious in a number of respects for reasons I stated at the time we were debating it here. Neither the Government, the corporation nor the county councils need any further powers. This Bill is not designed to help them get back possession of property which has fallen into the hands of squatters; they have that provision in the Bill we passed last July.

Is it then a problem of people's houses being occupied by squatters pushing their way in, taking over rooms and squeezing people out of their houses? I have not heard of such a case and if any such cases have occurred they have received singularly little publicity in a country where a demonstration of any kind usually receives a great deal of publicity. Is this the danger? Where is it threatened? Where has it happened? The Bill is not designed to deal with that. What problem does this Bill deal with which is not dealt with adequately by provisions in the existing law?

This Bill is designed to deal with only one form of squatting which has taken place by certain groups with whose activities I have little sympathy, who have occupied various unoccupied buildings for, in some cases, political purposes. In one instance where the democratic process broke down it seemed to me to be justified. I am not prepared to condemn in unmeasured terms other cases without knowing more about them. Certainly, I would distinguish between the fairly innocent squatter, the individual, who, forced by circumstances to find a home, does so in an empty unused building and political agitators who move in to cash in on the process. That is the problem this Bill is designed to tackle.

It is designed to deal with a situation where the property developer buys up a number of houses but it takes some time to do so; it may take some years. When he gets hold of them he boards them up and keeps out anybody who might make a home there for fear they might be awkward tenants which is something the law should deal with. A useful reform of the law would be one that would ensure, where a developer is in that position and allows a tenant into an empty house for a period, that when the area is ready for demolition he can speedily and quickly ensure the building is vacated. Such a reform would release a great deal of property. Wherever one goes in the city one finds buildings boarded up in this way waiting some day to be demolished when the property developer gets hold of another property nearby. I understand and sympathise with the property developer's dilemma. I am not too critical of him for not letting people in because he is afraid he will never get them out. Anything that could be done to help with that particular problem and enable these properties to be used during that period would be a useful reform. The Bill does not attempt to deal with that problem.

This is the only problem of which I am aware that this Bill is designed to deal with except the reference the Minister made in his opening speech to fish-ins, but as far as buildings are concerned this is the only problem in question. It seems to me, but I am open to correction on this because I have not sought legal advice on this particular point, that the fish-ins as a form of trespass could be dealt with under the Summary Jurisdiction Act of 1851 which is the only parliamentary Act of these islands ever passed which made trespass a criminal offence. That would provide a remedy, so this Bill is not required for that purpose.

This man was allowed to take people from the side of the street and bring them in as members of his private security force and let them attack people and the Minister's reaction is not to regulate private police forces, not to lay down a code of conduct for them and make them subject to inspection by the ordinary police who will ensure that they are people who have no criminal record. No, that is not his concern; but he brings in a Bill to defend the right of the property owner who acts in that way. I do not think a Minister who takes that course of action in those circumstances and fails to deal with the menace of the private police force, uncontrolled, has any right to stand up here and talk about serving law and order.

This legislation is repressive in its origins. It is repressive in the principle that lies behind it and in all its details. It makes trespass in a building a criminal offence for the first time. The only form of trespass which is a criminal offence is trespass on land under the Summary Jurisdiction Act of 1851, an Act introduced to deal with land agitation here and it is our own Irish Government that for the first time extend this principle to making trespass in a building a criminal offence. It might be more to the point if those who fought and won the battle for the land were vindicated now by the removal of this particularly iniquitous provision from the Summary Jurisdiction Act instead of extending it. But the Minister has no thought of that. If the Minister had been here in the 1880s we know what side he would have been on. He would not have been on the side of the agitators. He would have been on the side of the landlords and the landlords would have been vindicated.

As well as making trespass in building a criminal offence for the first time, this Bill makes it a criminal offence for a man who thinks he has a claim of right against a landlord and pursues it. For example, a man who is a tenant of a house sends, at the end of his letting, further rent to his landlord and the landlord accepts it. In certain circumstances the acceptance of that rent could create a yearly tenancy and the man could genuinely claim that the acceptance of the rent has created such a tenancy and he could defend his right, the right he believes to exist, by locking the door against the landlord and his hired thugs. For six centuries the law in Ireland has protected that man. What the Minister now proposes to do is to make such a man a criminal because, if he cannot prove his claim in court, a claim he genuinely believes he has, then, without his realising it, he becomes a criminal to be sent to jail, although all he did was defend his occupation of his own property, acting in pursuance of the principle that the law of this country has protected for six centuries, the law that the occupier must be protected against the landlord who may proceed only by way of the courts.

The same thing could happen in the case of a farmer who takes conacre. He might lock the gate against the owner. He too will go to jail under this repressive legislation. So will the businessman if he locks the door against his landlord and cannot prove his claim in court. This is a complete reversion of six centuries of Anglo-Irish jurisprudence.

Again, this Bill has a provision whereby any member of an association on behalf of which a statement is issued supporting a demonstration, such as the Hume Street demonstration, will be guilty of an offence unless he repudiates his colleagues. People will be forced to stand up and say, to save their skins: "Oh, we did not agree with our friends in the organisation which has put out a statement in support of the action". Unless people are prepared to take the dishonourable course of repudiating their colleagues they, too, will be sent to jail in what the Minister says is not guilt by association.

In this repressive legislation there is a unique provision. When the invaders have wreaked their vengeance on the people and the property itself, as happened in a number of cases, the damage they do will be charged to the occupier even if that occupier has a claim of right and had the right to remain on the property. Even in those circumstances the damage is charged to the innocent occupier who thought he had a right to be there. I thought that kind of repressive legislation went out a century or so ago.

For the first time this Bill gives the district court the primary right of determining property rights, not the final right because, if the occupier thinks he has a tenancy and if he has the money to appeal to a higher court, he may be able to establish his position, after he has been turned out on to the streets. What this Bill does is to ensure that property rights will, for the first time, be determined in the first instance in the district court and the man who loses the case there will be unable to prove his right to occupy the property unless he can find the money to appeal; his rights disappear at the hands of a stronger landlord. This is a new principle in Irish law.

Finally, there is power to arrest without warrant. This is a power which should not be given in this case. I know of no Bill, except the Criminal Justice Bill of unhappy memory, that contains such a unique list of repressive provisions designed to wreak vengeance on anyone who stands in the way of a man who may be an unscrupulous person, as some of these people are as we have seen from their behaviour.

Some people may say some Bill is necessary. Perhaps this Bill is too repressive. Perhaps it could be watered down by amendments, but something needs to be done. Just what needs to be done? What has happened in the sister country, as it is sometimes called, Great Britain? They too had their problems. There was Piccadilly a year or two ago. Even the present Tory Government have not introduced this kind of repressive legislation. They found a simple solution. They changed the Rules of Court to enable an injunction to be taken against any named people and in that way they resolved this problem within the existing civil code. Such a provision here would need to be reinforced by measures to speed up the process, to simplify it and reduce its cost. These are simple administrative measures that could be taken quite easily. That is all that is required to ensure that any person whose property is wrongly occupied can recover possession, simply, expeditiously and cheaply. This is good enough for the Tory Government in Britain but not good enough for the repressive Fianna Fáil Government here. They must have their pound of flesh, guilt by association, arrest without warrant, charging the damage done to the invaders, making a criminal out of a man who may have a private claim in right and a perfectly good reason for believing he has a right to be there.

This Bill is unnecessary because the problem, such as it is — and it is a very limited one — can be easily solved by the simple reform introduced last April in Britain by the Lord Chancellor changing the Rules of Court. Why is that not good enough here? Is there some massive threat here that does not exist in Britain? Anybody who knows anything about the situation knows that the problems of squatting in Britain are ten times greater than here and if they, with a Government which is by no means a liberal one, found it possible to deal with that by the simple expedient of changing the Rules of Court, why in this country is it necessary to cope with it by introducing a measure of this repressive kind?

This Bill reverses six centuries of legislation designed to protect the occupier. The law on this subject goes back a long way and for good reason because in the fourteenth century there were men very similar to some of the people today on whose behalf this Bill is being introduced. There were men who were impatient of the law and legal processes. Perhaps they had more reason to be because, perhaps, it was more difficult to get the law reformed in those days. Landlords who wanted to get their tenants out and were not prepared to go to court because, perhaps, the delay would be too long, forcibly evicted their tenants and in those feudal times at the end of the fourteenth century the Government was much more liberal than the Government we have today. That Government intervened to introduce the Forcible Entries Act to protect the occupier against forcible eviction and if forcibly evicted, even by his landlord who had absolute right to the property, that landlord could be fined or sent to jail because it was vitally important that any man in occupation of property should have his right protected except against due legal process and that no landlord or baron, however powerful or developer however rich, should have the right to put him out by force using his private army, because there were private security forces in those days also.

The law in Britain at that time and later in Ireland, as I shall show, was changed in order to protect the occupier against that kind of eviction, in order to preserve the peace, because it was found — as it will be found if this Bill goes through — that by leaving in those circumstances the right to forcibly expel occupiers to landlords, the landlords took the law into their own hands and violence spread through the country. Law and order broke down and to preserve law and order and the rights of occupiers and to preserve the legal system and force landlords to use it and not use violence, the Forcible Entries Act was introduced. It is not entirely clear to me whether under the law of that time that Act operated in this country or not. There may be arguments about that, but it is not arguable that in 1402 an Irish statute or Forcible Entries Act was enacted. This statute is unique because it differs from the British Act in a vital respect which shows what extra concern there was in this country for the right of the occupier, even going beyond the British law in the matter. The British law ended with a clause dealing with some ecclesiastical matters. Perhaps ecclesiastical benefices were not such a problem in Ireland in those days as they were in Britain. In the Irish Act, that is omitted and in its place there is a phrase which is important and which means that the law in Ireland at this time — because, as far as I know, this Act of 1402 is still in force: I should be interested to hear the Minister if he will contend that it is not— ensures that not alone will a landlord who forcibly occupies the property of his tenants be sent to jail or fined but under the Irish legislation and not under the British legislation, the tenant has the right to be reinstated until the landlord goes back to the courts and takes legal action.

In the original Act it is stated here in the legal language of the time, which, of course, was French — I shall give the English translation in case my Old French pronunciation is dubious as well as my modern French pronunciation:

In case any such entry has been made by force as aforesaid that it be held for naught, saving at another time to the party his entry peaceably in due form if he have right.

That was the liberal legislation of 1402 in this country under which, not alone could a landlord be punished for forcing his way into the property of his tenant even if he had the right to that property, but the tenant had the right to go into that property again and remain there until the law took its course. In those days they believed in law and order, not in setting aside the law and giving to violent men the right to take over property and expel occupiers who may have a perfect right to be there or believe they have such a right. In the British Act that is not present. The law in Britain differs from that in Ireland in that respect as was held in the Stoke-Pogis case in 1921 where the steward of a golf course was ejected by the club members. After they had a fairly inebriated evening they went together to his house and threw him out because he had a few drinks too many. They were subject to punishment for their action but he had no right to get back into the property. There was no clause in the English legislation such as there is in the Irish legislation.

The Irish law for almost six centuries now has defended the right of the occupier and that is in the Irish tradition because we have always been concerned with the right of tenants against landlords until this Government came into power and now it is the right of the landlord and to hell with the tenant. Even the British regime in this country 90 years ago did not attempt to change the law as it is now being changed. Never in our history was an attempt made to support landlords against tenants in this way, not even in the most extreme period of British oppression. We had to wait for Fianna Fáil to do it.

We should be proud in this country that the law has been that much more liberal. Our Act of 1402 is one of the most enlightened pieces of legislation protecting the rights of the occupier and restoring them if they are forcibly denied by the landlord even if, as may well be shown when the landlord takes his case to the courts, the tenant is proved to be wrong. It is vital that the question of whether the tenant is right or wrong in his occupation should be determined by the courts peaceably and in due form as the 1402 Act says and not by any landlord forcing his way in with the help of a private police force or the Garda Síochána whom he can now summon to his support under this despicable Bill.

Those in this House who are concerned with the rights of individuals and with law and order have no alternative but to oppose this Bill. That is my personal view: others may not share it. They may see it in a simpler light but I have no doubt as to where I must stand in this matter. I cannot accept legislation at this stage which reverses six centuries of the tradition of protecting the occupiers, which would threaten the rights of the occupier. No man will know from now on if he does not pay his rent up to date when the private police force or the Garda Síochána may come to put him out and he would be forced in the courts to argue the case as to whether the rent had to be paid then, whether he was on time or whether the rent he did send in was sufficient to give him the tenancy and forced, if defeated in the district court at short notice on that, to take an expensive case to a higher court and in the meantime denied the right to possession of his home.

I find it hard to conceive of any Government in their senses bringing in legislation like this. However, they have done so and we can only say why we oppose it. I know that in taking a stand on this Bill I shall be accused by somebody of encouraging squatting, a good old corny accusation to make. I have spoken long ago in this House on this subject to make my position clear. I certainly do not want to encourage squatting in any shape or form. It creates more problems than it solves and creates grave injustices in many cases. Squatting in corporation dwellings can create very great injustices if those who squat are not, as they often are not, at the top of the queue. We must distinguish here between a social problem created by the neglect of housing by this Government, a social problem which needs to be tackled and for which a solution is necessary, and repressive legislation.

I think I mentioned before, but if I did not it is no harm to mention now, the case of a man who is squatting in corporation property at the moment. He is a decent man and does not like being there and he is doing his best to find private accommodation, even beyond his means. The reason he is there is one which I have to respect in his case, for him as an individual. I may say, and say to him, that he has no right to be there, that he ought to leave, but I am not prepared to condemn him. This man was living in a flat on the other side of the city, with his wife, two children, his parents-in-law and brothers and sisters, to a number which I cannot recall offhand, in conditions of utter congestion and overcrowding. His father-in-law was removed to Blanchardstown and died of TB. The corporation said that there was no hope of housing him and he had the choice either of staying in that place watching, one after the other, as happened, two of his in-laws going down with TB also and waiting for it to strike at his children, or else squatting because he could not get any private accommodation at that time at a rent which he could conceivably afford and so he squatted.

Is there anybody in this House who faced with that threat to the health of their children, and in that situation, would have remained on in those conditions—the father-in-law dead from TB, a brother-in-law and a sister-in-law ill with TB? Which of us would have remained on there in those circumstances and not moved out? We must distinguish between two different things as the law of God distinguishes. We all know that if a man is starving there is no moral law which prevents him from taking food to keep him and his family alive. There is of course a law of the land against it.

We should be slow to make criminal offences in cases like this when a civil remedy can exist that is adequate. We must clearly distinguish between condemning squatting and trying on the other hand to solve the problem of squatting by appropriate means and by using appropriate weapons but not trying to turn decent people who are trying in impossible conditions to save the lives of their children, as this man has had to do, into criminals and sending them to jail. This man may well be sent to jail tomorrow, or next week, or next month, as he knows. I had to tell him. After the Bill was passed in July I went to see him and I said "You realise that now you may have to go to jail if you do not move out? You are now liable to prison; you were not before, but you are now". He said he realised that and that he would certainly try to get alternative accommodation but he could not go back to where he was, and he would not. I could not say to him that he should.

We must distinguish between the general problem, and what the law must do, and these particular cases. While, of course, hard cases make bad law, do not let us ourselves make bad laws, unnecessarily harsh laws to deal with social problems which we have created because whose fault is it that that man is in that condition? It is not his fault. It is the fault of those in Government who have allowed the housing situation in this city to deteriorate, as it has done, so that whereas last year there was time when a man with one child could actually get a flat—for a month or two there was a chance of his getting a flat in one place, in Ballymun — that is no longer true. It is a city in which a couple of months ago I was told that a family with two children had a very good chance of getting a flat in Ballybough but when the Ballybough buildings were completed I was told there was no chance. The situation has now got so bad that only families with three children can be housed. It is a city in which the housing situation is deteriorating month by month, in which the ante is being raised, in which people cannot have children fast enough to catch up with the number of children that you must have to get a house. house.

That is not the fault of the squatters; it is the fault of the Government and it was no answer to that problem to introduce this kind of repressive legislation, which is unnecessarily repressive, when there is another solution. I would have some sympathy with the principle of introducing legislation of this kind if there were no other solution, but when the problem has been resolved in much more difficult circumstances in Britain, in a manner which does not in any way destroy the right of the occupier to protection in the courts, which he has enjoyed for six centuries, I see no reason to destroy that right now and to bring in a Bill with six repressive provisions in it at this stage, to crack this particular nut.

Of course, there must be adequate power to deal with squatting but that power must be exercised through the court and not by strong-arm men and not by landlords backed up by a most reluctant Garda Síochána. Had this Bill been law eight months or a year ago the jails would have been enlivened, shall we say, by the company of a number of people of varying degrees of distinction. I myself would have been one of them under the provision about encouraging people. Distinguished people like Professor Myles Dillon, Mr. Niall Montgomery and many others spoke out on that occasion as well as myself. Deputy Dr. Browne, Deputy Justin Keating and Deputy Cruise-O'Brien would also have joined these distinguished ranks. It would have been ironic if 90 years after the land war Professor Myles Dillon found himself in jail under a law introduced by an Irish Government so much more repressive than the law which his father fought against 90 years ago. That is what could have happened if this Bill had been introduced then. It might have improved the tone of Mountjoy but this House should be thinking of other things than this. Those are the reasons I oppose this Bill and they seem to me to be sufficient and adequate reasons and I make no apology for doing this.

Dr. Cruise-O'Brien

The Labour Party have considered this Bill and decided to oppose it and vote against it, that is, to vote against it in the event of its being put to a vote, because we have had experience with this Government of various measures, suggestions and proposals being put forward as extremely urgent and of critical importance and necessary to meet, as was the case with the emergency detention to which the Taoiseach referred, an emergency threatening the life of the nation, or to meet an economic crisis as the Prices and Incomes Bill was supposed to do. These things are announced with great pomp and flurry but then they do not always come to anything. In some cases they just fade away. I wonder whether this may be the case with this measure. It may not, of course. However, it does seem to be a possibility foreshadowed in the Minister's speech which contains something of an implicit contradiction between its beginning and its end.

At the beginning he said:

This is a Bill to deal with a problem to which the community has been increasingly exposed in recent times.

Good. Well, that is something worth serious consideration. However, at the end he stated:

It so happens that just at the moment we are in a period of relative quiet so far as the particular problem with which the Bill is designed to deal with is concerned.

So it is not actually increasing, as the Minister says at the beginning, it is decreasing. I would think it possible, as I would certainly think it desirable, that this Bill may, like so many other measures, be put at least on the very long finger, perhaps after getting through this Stage. I should add, however, that we will oppose it on this Stage also. We consider this Bill to be a clear example of legislative over-kill and completely unjustifiable when introduced, as the Minister himself confesses, in a period of relative quiet.

A Government, any Government solicitous for the rights of the citizens, solicitous for not unnecessarily and unduly extending coercive power, should be reluctant to introduce a measure of this kind and should only concede the necessity for it under very grave pressure. This Government do not seem to be reluctant, if we take this Bill at its face value; they seem quite eager to possess such powers, or at least to hold in reserve — and this seems to be more their strategy — the possibility, or the threat of possessing them.

Let us assume that a situation exists in which law-breaking is on the increase. By the Minister's own admission this is not actually the case in respect of the category of offender who is envisaged here but let us assume it is. What would be the strategy of a wise Government? Surely it would be to act in such a way as to dry up the sources of law-breaking, to look into the deep, underlying causes which bring this about and to deal with them and, in the meantime, to apply the existing law firmly but with a reasonable tact? It would not be to tighten up the existing law so as to multiply the number of offences and offenders and increase the confrontation, the social pain and struggle. This should be all the more the situation if we are, as is the case, living out a lull in relation to matters such as squatting. The lull surely should be the occasion for an attack on the roots of the problem.

Of course, the Minister does not concede that there is a serious problem and this fact is, in itself, one of the most serious aspects of the Government's approach to this problem. If the Minister for Justice does not know it, certainly the members of his party who are representative of constituencies in Dublin city—as I am—know there is a very serious housing problem and that the references to this by the Minister for Justice were completely and shamefully inadequate.

Conscious of the feelings of a Dublin constituency, Deputy Dowling tried to take some of the harm out of this — I should imagine Deputy Moore also may do so in a moment — by talking about bad landlords whom he condemned in strong language, which I must say I would have to call demagogic in the circumstances. He condemned speculators and so on while, at the same time, making crystal clear his intention to vote for a measure that will make life easier for bad landlords. It will make it easier for them to be even worse landlords and it will make it easy for speculators to benefit from that condition of additional security for that kind of property holding.

In reading the Minister's speech one wonders just exactly what he and the Government are at in this Bill. There is a very strong emphasis on what he calls "quasi political groups". I suppose this means political groups who adopt certain forms of action envisaged here. What effect are we to look for from a measure aimed at these groups and these tactics in conditions where these tactics are diminishing, as they have been in recent months? How far will the question of the implementation, or the non-implementation, of this Bill depend on the play of political forces in and around the governing party, affecting the question of whether they wish to take tough action affecting —let us call things by their name— Sinn Féin? I think that is a possibility we will have to consider.

Squatting takes many different forms. Many Deputies have referred to squatting in local authority houses as "jumping the queue". The Labour Party have made their position clear on that; they are opposed to it. We have a points system for the allocation of houses which is reasonable in itself. The injustices that prevail under the system are not to be attributed so much to the system of allocation of the houses as to the fact that the houses simply are not there. I believe existing houses are allocated reasonably fairly and those who squat in houses in these conditions are inflicting an injustice on others. On these benches we would not condone that activity. We are opposed to it but, as Deputy FitzGerald has pointed out, we already possess adequate legal powers to deal with it. It has been legislatively dealt with and, I believe, with general support here.

Whatever the legalities of the matter, are any of us prepared to say that we condemn totally, unconditionally, and in all circumstances, squatting of all kinds? If we were to say that, we would be saying that a family who have not a roof over their head and have not an immediate possibility of getting a house are under the duty of obeying the law by exposing their children to the weather and their children's health to grave risk. That is an unethical and unchristian position and I do not believe anyone would defend it here. Yet, this Bill is so conceived that it accords to people in that position only a brief, grudging stay of execution before the law catches up with them. That is one strong reason to oppose it.

There is also the case of squatting to draw attention to a flagrant abuse. The Hume Street squatting has been adduced there. That was a case where the action taken was, I presume, illegal. Yet the public opinion of this country — as it has done in connection with similar activities throughout much of our past — accepted in what we might call the spirit of philosophical juris-prudence that the activity concerned was not only well-intentioned but had a good effect in helping to save for our children a part of our national heritage. It induced the Government to adopt a new approach, or at least something that may prove to be a new approach in relation to this whole matter. However, that new approach may have been deceptive because what we get here is the provision for tougher measures with the people who "sat in" in Hume Street with the general approval of the press and public opinion of this country. Such people would get it in the neck under this Bill and so indeed — when I speak of the press — would the press who praised the Hume Street squatters. I hope the press will reflect and comment on the implications of section 4 of this Bill which speaks of groups who encourage and advocate; the groups are not limited and I would presume that the people concerned with the bringing out of a newspaper which praised, as many of our newspapers did, those who sat in in Hume Street, would be subject to the penalties in this Bill. That is one of these numerous, steady erosions of our rights and freedoms which this Government have often been prepared to contemplate with great equanimity and sometimes to apply.

The general approach of the Bill is significant in the following regards. Its timing and its tenor indicate that it is aimed at suppressing protests irrespective of the merits of the protest, and preventing occupation of residential property by homeless people. It ignores the fact that protest may be, and homelessness always is, the sign of serious unhealthiness in the community. In other words it attacks the symptoms or the results of a national ill-health rather than the ill-health itself, and this despite the fact that the gentleman who presents the Bill to us, the Minister for Justice, acknowledges that the symptoms of this are on the decrease, and this should surely give him time to deal with the roots of the problem rather than the symptoms.

Let it not be said, as the Minister implies, that this is just a question of dealing with those bad men, those political agitators who drum up grievances where no serious grievances are and that this is not intended to crush the squatter who squats out of necessity. You will note that under section 7 of the Bill increased penalties are provided for subsequent offences, that is to say, that if a family man squats with his family in vacant property he is liable to arrest and may be imprisoned. If when he gets out, still being homeless, he does the same thing again, then he is liable to be imprisoned not merely for six months but for 12. If he is convicted on indictment instead of in the district court, he may get three years. Is it the case that regular imprisonment for increasing terms is the Government's solution to the problems of homeless people?

We all heard this evening the painful case cited by Deputy FitzGerald of a man and his family who are squatting illegally, as Deputy FitzGerald has pointed out, because if they did not squat the children would be running the risk of a tubercular infection which members of the family had, in fact, mitting an offence. If they were to sustained, but here they would be commove from one property in which they had squatted to another for the same reason, the offence would escalate and also their penalties. Therefore, the Bill is aimed at suppressing protest irrespective of the methods of the protest, and it is not designed effectively in such a way as to spare those who have to squat out of necessity. It adds to the problem of the otherwise homeless squatter by holding over his head the danger of being charged with a serious criminal offence. It puts the interest of property owners before the rights of the homeless poor, and that is its entire spirit.

Deputy Moore, who is about to speak after me, I know has sympathy for the homeless of this city, and I would put to him that sentence: "This Bill puts the interest of property-owners before the rights of the homeless poor," and I would ask him to answer that challenge and to show this House in what way this Bill puts the rights of the homeless poor before the interest of the property owners. I think he would have to be a very ingenious advocate to detect anything in this Bill that does that, because this is a property-owners' Bill and a Bill of a property-owners' Government. This Bill diverts attention from the principal problem which is a widespread lack of adequate housing and in many cases a lack of any housing affecting a large section of the population.

As has been pointed out, in a neighbouring country, this has been dealt with in a different way. In England a new order of the rules of the Supreme Court — I understand the number was 113 — came into force last summer. This provides that a final order should not be made except by a judge in person and except in cases of urgency and by consent of the court it should not be made until seven days have elapsed since the date of the summons. A special form of summons is available where the identity of the occupants is not known. The summons may be addressed: "To whom it may concern". If an order is made on foot of such a summons then the sheriff's officers are entitled to obtain possession and to vacate the entire premises, removing from it anybody who is in occupation whether or not he is named in the summons or even if nobody is named. This is an effective way of enabling the owner of properties to get rid of squatters by the use of due process.

I am merely looking for clarification——

An Ceann Comhairle

Deputy Cruise-O'Brien.

Dr. Cruise-O'Brien

The English model may not give as urgent and drastic a redress as some people seem to think necessary. We do not think it necessary to be more drastic than the British Tory Government find it necessary to be, or to institute changes of that nature in the legal system. However, the essential point about the British model here is that it is a model which takes account of, which is respectful of the idea of due process, and which is not emanated by the kind of spirit which we see more and more of in documents presented to us here, that the whole idea, is to give a free hand to the gardaí and all will be well. That is a dangerous spirit. It is a spirit which is coming to the fore more and more in many countries, including the United States and Canada, and which is, I think, as serious a source of disquiet to the citizens as the law-breaking which it is ostensibly aimed to combat. In fact, we have found that this kind of extension of police power is not a favourable symptom of what is happening in society and it is not a good way of dealing with these matters. It is a way of bringing about maximum confrontation. I think that among the people who have organised various forms of activity which this Bill is aimed at there must be some, perhaps many, who are hoping that this Bill will be passed and applied so that we will have the maximum confrontation, the maximum clash, the maximum possibilities of charging police brutality and so on. There are people who want that. We on these benches do not want that and that is among the reasons why we consider this an unwise and dangerous measure and a further erosion of our rights as citizens.

I should like to refer to the question of the constitutionality of this whole measure. I presume the Government have been advised. I presume they have taken advice as to whether everything in this is constitutional. I hope we will hear a little bit more about that. Of course the Government, under ouh Constitution, are not the final and determining authority on whether it is constitutional or not. Even if the Minister tells us it is constitutional he may well be wrong but at least it would be interesting to hear why he thinks it is constitutional. Article 41 (1) of the Constitution reads as follows:

The State recognises the Family as the natural primary and fundamental unit group of Society, and as a moral institution possessing inalienable and imprescriptible rights, antecedent and superior to all positive law.

The State, therefore, guarantees to protect the Family in its constitution and authority, as the necessary basis of social order and as indispensable to the welfare of the Nation and the State.

Broadly speaking, the majority of the homeless squatters are married people. Generally speaking it is only after marriage and when there are children that people find the need to have a separate place. Most single people stay with their families. So, it is the family that is affected. This Bill as well as the Housing Bill — some aspects of the Housing Bill at least — but certainly this Bill is, in effect, an attack on the family unit whose rights are stated in the Constitution to be antecedent and superior to all positive law. One would wonder what view would be taken in relation to that if the case described by Deputy FitzGerald were to come within the cognisance of a court if such a family met with penalties under this Bill. We would like to hear from the Minister about this. How exactly is this Bill consonant with the section of the Constitution which I have read in so far as it may be invoked against families?

We will have an opportunity of discussing each section of the Bill in Committee. I do not want to go through them in detail at the moment. We have received, I suppose, some education in civil liberties and civil rights if only as a result of the developing situations in the North, and anyone concerned with civil liberty must look with horror at section 4 of this Bill. In particular what is disturbing about this is not the letter of the Bill itself but the completely casual, callous, insensitive way in which this Government extend the area of State or police control, the way that they override freedom of expression, freedom of the Press. All through Western Europe and in America and many other parts of the world there is a struggle going on over similar things, that is to say, in what circumstances is it right to curb freedom of expression? I do not think anywhere among countries where democracy is practised and there is at least nominal respect for civil rights, I do not think anywhere in recent times such an instrument has been envisaged as this one. I would like to consider how the Minister deals with it. He says:

"I understand". Apparently he does not read the newspapers.

—there is in this no element of guilt by association. A member of a group is not being held responsible for what other members say unless what is said was said by or on behalf of the group.

Of course if it was said by or on behalf of the group then he is being held responsible. He is not just responsible, he is guilty of an offence if something is said by somebody else with whom he is associated. If that is not guilt by association what on earth is it?

He goes on:

A member of a group is not being held responsible for what other members say unless what he said was said by or on behalf of the group. Here I would point out that whether a statement has been made on behalf of a group is a question of fact which the prosecution would have to prove and, accordingly, the provision could not apply to a statement purporting to be made on behalf of the group which was actually made by some outsider.

Well, this is to tell us that the common law is not being entirely demolished by section 4 of this particular Bill. We need not thank the Minister or the Government for this. He goes on and this is more interesting:

Even though the provision is limited in this way, it might be unfair to individual members of a group to allow them no line of retreat where a spokesman has perhaps said more than some members would wish and subsection (3) of section 4 provides, therefore, that it will be a good defence for a person charged with such an offence to prove that he immediately took all reasonable steps open to him to dissociate himself from the statement or that the statement was made without his knowledge or that it was made without his consent.

Notice on whom the onus now falls. It is not, as we are taught in our studies of our legal system, a burden of proof on the prosecution; it is a burden of proof on the man himself. You belong to what is vaguely called a group of persons. A group of persons could be anything, including a newspaper. It could be a radio. It could be a television session. It could be a political party. It could be a club. It could be anything. A group of persons could be literally anything whatever. If some member of this group says something which can be taken as encouraging or advocating the commission of an offence, then all the members of the group are prima facie guilty of that offence.

Notice that it is not even enough for the Minister to make it advocating an offence. It has to be encouraging an offence. If somebody in a group to which you belong seems to a court to have encouraged an offence under this Bill, then everybody concerned is guilty of the offence unless he can exculpate himself. The burden is on him. No doubt the original man who encouraged or advocated it has the benefit of the normal legal right of the citizen that the offence has to be proved against him but, once it is proved, that is it. Then the burden shifts.

If a leader writer on one of our papers does something like saying that the squatters in Hume Street on the whole did a good job because they brought the Government to consider the question of our heritage in this city then, if that leader writer is deemed to have encouraged squatting — and I think it would be reasonable to find that he did in those circumstances— then the board of his newspaper, his colleagues on it, and certainly his editor, would be deemed to be guilty unless they would repudiate him.

At this level there is something sordid about this Bill and particularly about the Minister's explanation of it, something that very much recalls the McCarthy days in the United States. Even though the provision is limited— it might be unfair to individual members of a group to allow them no line of retreat — it is provided there that it will be a good defence for a person charged with such an offence to prove that he immediately took all reasonable steps to dissociate himself: in other words, if he runs away, if he repudiates his colleague, if he humiliates himself and his group in these circumstances, and if he says he will be a good boy, then he will be kindly let off, at that cost. I think this is a very wrong provision and a very wrong excuse for the provision.

Mr. Timmons

Is the Deputy in favour of squatters? He is advocating squatting.

An Ceann Comhairle

Order.

Dr. Cruise-O'Brien

Deputy Timmons has not, perhaps, been following my argument very closely. In any case, I would prefer if I might be allowed to make my own arguments rather than to go down there.

An Ceann Comhairle

Yes. I think the Deputy should pay no attention to the interruption.

Dr. Cruise-O'Brien

I will do so, Sir, if I may. The point about this clearly is that within any group — and I think this would be true of any of the three main groups in this House — there could well be a span of opinion. We realise now that there is a considerable span of opinion on these benches on my left on such a matter, with definite views held of a different character by people who respect one another generally and who can work together generally for a common cause.

Deputy FitzGerald said, and it is true, that in certain circumstances he, as I also, and other Deputies here gave what the court could reasonably regard as encouragement to a group of people in Hume Street who were engaged in squatting. We did that. I know that Deputy Sir Anthony Esmonde would take a poor view — and I respect his motives and his position — of that kind of activity and that kind of encouragement. Deputy Esmonde will forgive me if I introduce his name purely for the purpose of the illustration of an argument and without any other intention.

Supposing Deputy FitzGerald — after this Bill becomes law, if it ever does become law — were to be so rash as to contravene it, or was found guilty, perhaps, without having contravened it, or found guilty having contravened it, in a case to which he attached importance. We know that Deputy FitzGerald would not do such a thing lightly. Supposing he is found guilty of doing it, then the pressure is on Deputy Esmonde. He is guilty of the same offence. He might very much disapprove of what Deputy FitzGerald had done, but the pressure would be on him. He would be guilty of the same offence unless he scurried forward and disavowed Deputy FitzGerald.

One might well disapprove of or dislike something a colleague in a group had said without at all being willing to go so far as to disavow him, particularly at a moment when he stood in danger or when he had in fact been penalised. Anyone who felt a scruple of that kind would find very scant comfort in this Bill or in the type of explanation which has accompanied it. So, I would entirely repudiate and reject the claim made by the Minister here that this section of the Bill does not introduce guilt by association. Guilt by association in its most abhorrent and humiliating form is precisely what it does introduce and it compounds that by adding to guilt by association the reversal of the normal process whereby a person is considered innocent until he is found guilty. I do not know whether that is in accordance with the Constitution. I hope it is not. I think it is certainly not in accordance with the spirit of reasonable liberty under which we should try to live.

I must ask the Minister this. Does he know of any provision equivalent to this which has been introduced and has become law in any other country in recent years? Perhaps he will tell us whether there are precedents for this, I will not say in Greece, or in Albania, or in Spain, or in Bulgaria, but in countries with legal systems similar to ours——

A Deputy

Or in Cuba.

Dr. Cruise-O'Brien

Cuba, if you wish — countries with traditions which are similar to ours and which have a respect for due process and for the rights even of the accused. I do not think it is sufficient answer to that simply to leer and shout "Cuba." I am not arguing in favour of Cuban jurisprudence. The kind of measure which is evoked here is the kind of law for which people legitimately criticise or attack countries like Cuba. It is not the Labour Party who are trying to introduce a provision of this kind. It is the governing party.

We challenge the Minister to produce from the legislation of, I will not say the individual States in the United States but the Federation, Canada, Scandinavia, Britain, West Germany or wherever he likes, some equivalent to this law and to give us an opportunity of consulting that in the Library. I wanted to make that challenge to him because in the Committee Stage of this Bill, assuming it comes to a Committee Stage, we will necessarily have a great deal more to say about this pernicious, callous and humiliating piece of legislation which is offered to us in particular in section 4 of this Bill.

In winding up his speech the Minister spoke about the housing situation itself. He said:

Dublin and to a lesser extent other cities and towns, like cities and towns in every other country that we know of, have a shortage of houses, though it is of nothing like the dimensions that some of the critics would have us think.

I should like to hear Deputy Moore on that.

Dáil Éireann debate - Wednesday, 27 Jan 1971

Prohibition of Forcible Entry and Occupation Bill, 1970: Second Stage.

A Deputy

Dáil Éireann debate -
Wednesday, 27 Jan 1971