Nobody that I know of has any such rights unless these rights are given to him under this Bill. Perhaps the Minister could tell us something about that. No warrant which can be issued, no insignia, no mark, no uniform, no way in which to identify, as in the case of the gardaí, nothing to indicate that he has a right to do whatever it is he proposes to do, a right to evict an individual and his family from a house of which he may have taken possession, simply because of the failure of the Government to provide housing.
A man has no house. It may be a very cold, a very wet, a very wild night and he and his family have nowhere to go except into this house. It is wildly irresponsible of the Minister to incorporate such a loosely worded provision in this Bill, a provision which will allow a wealthy German, a wealthy Frenchman, a wealthy Dutchman or a wealthy Dane to buy up property here and, because he probably cannot even speak the language, he will be forced to employ an Irishman to go along and assert his right as an owner and evict somebody, somebody of the type mentioned by Deputy Cooney earlier, somebody who has been in a house for many, many years, and generations of his family before him. This man and his family may be evicted. It may be an unfortunate man, his wife and children, with no house at all.
No identifying qualifications are included in this section in respect of either the individual or the agency. Under this section anybody who happens to join a security organisation can be employed in this fashion. In fact, he need not join a security organisation at all, as someone mentioned earlier. It could be an advertisement in the paper: "Wanted an individual who will clear a wife and family out of a house for me. Must be able to achieve results and will be paid on those results." It is as simple and as crude as that. Any individual who happens to want a few pounds can come along and look for the job of getting rid of these unfortunate people from some property, a property which may be deliberately held empty over a matter of months, or even years, a property being held empty by an individual as a speculative venture, a property he will insist on holding empty because he is waiting to get as big a price as he can for it. This man will have the right to appoint his own private police force in order to achieve his particular objective in regard to this piece of property.
Are we to take it there is no serious difference between any member of the public who volunteers for this rather dirty, unpleasant, distasteful kind of work and the qualifications and expert knowledge of a member of the Garda? I do not think there is any doubt that special knowledge is needed in a situation of this kind. Our police force is particularly concerned with the keeping of the peace. The Garda Síochána did not become expert at their job overnight. They are men who are heirs to a good tradition. There are complaints from time to time about members of the Garda but generally speaking, and as I said earlier I had some experience of meeting them when I was in protest movements and in that way in conflict with them, they are able to exercise remarkable patience and forbearance under very difficult circumstances. It is not an accident that they are able to behave like that. It is largely due to the fact that as the years have gone by and as the various authorities in control of the Garda have learned the important prerequisites of a good policeman the standards for entry into the Garda have increased and they are now very stringent and rigid standards. They are the end product of many years of practical experience in handling difficult and distasteful situations of law enforcement of this kind.
Let us take the man who believes that he has what the Minister called a high moral right to stay in his house because his father was there, his grandfather was there, he grew up there and he hoped to make a home for his own family there. For that reason he felt very strongly indeed that he had a right to stay there. When that person is approached he is, understandably, going to be a very difficult person to deal with. One cannot send in anybody off the streets and say to him, "Get him out" without the possibility of serious repercussions either for the man who goes in to try to get him out or for the unfortunate man who is to be evicted.
Let us take the man who, with his wife and his three or four children, goes in, under appalling pressure, to a house because he has no hope and frequently it is no fault of his, he may or may not have the money for a house, whatever the reason he finds himself and his family to be homeless in all kinds of weather. He looks for shelter in a house because he has nowhere else to go. If that man is approached by an individual who is told "Do the job and you will get paid"—an individual who more than likely will try to cut corners and will not stop short, as we know from the Hume Street incident, of using strong-arm tactics—that individual, vested under this section with the power to evict forcibly an individual by virtue of his right of ownership established by this section, is dealing with an extremely potential explosive situation. Doctors, nurses and lawyers all have their little bit of expert knowledge of how to handle difficult situations. Their knowledge grows and expands as the years go by and they are less and less likely to make mistakes the longer they find themselves dealing with situations of this kind, but under this section any man at all, he might be a butcher, a doctor, a soldier, a lawyer, a builder's labourer, a TD or a Senator, can go along and attempt to deal with a man who has already suffered the humiliation of being unable to find a home for his family.
The Minister talked in a very patronising, paternalistic and benevolent tone about this man and his family. He said that they would not be hard on him and as long as he gets out peacefully, as long as he does not bar himself in, as long as he does not drop the snub on the lock and so long as he does not turn a key in the lock nobody will lay a finger on him, no one will touch him. Could any of us not put ourselves in the position of this unfortunate man with our young children and our wife in a derelict building, which we hate being in anyway, which is most uncomfortable, which is unheated, which has no lighting, which is probably leaking and which is probably rat-infested? We do not want to stay but we are there simply and solely because the Minister and his colleagues, acting in their capacity as Government, have failed to provide us with housing accommodation. It is not our fault, it is the fault of the Minister and his colleagues. The Minister then has the impertinence to incorporate in a section of his law a provision which allows a strong-arm bullyboy to come along to this unfortunate, destitute, homeless family and say: "Get out on the side of the street, this belongs to Herr Somebody-or-Other of Munich"—Hamburg, Paris, Amsterdam or wherever it may be—"As an Irishman and as a father of a family you have no right to stay here." At best they may offer him a place in Griffith Barracks in which his family is divided and as I said the other day the right of the integrity of the family as a basic unit of our society is taken away from him. The man can be put out in order to make way for the speculator or the bulldozers who have priority in our society, time and time again.
Notice taken that 20 Members were not present; House counted and 20 Members being present,