When the debate adjourned I was dealing with the credibility or otherwise of the Judiciary in the Six Counties. I held then and I hold now that they are not a credible, reputable or impartial Judiciary. Their record over the years, particularly in recent times, shows on the statistics available that they are neither fair nor impartial in the administration of their own laws. Therefore the participation of any member of the Six Counties Judiciary in the taking of evidence on commission for the purpose of prosecuting a person held by our courts here accused of some crime in the Six Counties is something we cannot countenance. The presence of such a member, far from lending credibility to the proceedings, must create in the minds of all that this is but a further part of the already loaded situation, the unfair and unjust situation created on a selective basis, and I emphasise "selective". That selection and selectivity, in the practical application of what is proposed here if this Bill becomes law, means that only Catholics and Nationalists will in fact be before our courts.
There are options available and a person taken in the Six Counties may opt to be tried in the Six Counties. In the light of the records to date a person of the Loyalist persuasion taken here, which is really a rather unlikely happening, will opt to go back to the courts where partiality is well established and where he can hope on the statistics of sentences handed out there to get only half the penalty in the Six Counties that he would get if he were prosecuted here, only half the sentence, in fact, that a Catholic or a Nationalist would get were he to opt to return to the Six Counties for trial. It is pretty obvious that the only people who will opt for trial in the Six Counties, taken down here for an offence allegedly committed in the Six Counties, will be those of the Loyalist group. They will go back knowing the courts will be partial and they will get light sentences. The Nationalist or the Catholic taken on this side on a charge, whether genuine or trumped up, if he opts to go back will be likely to get the hammer, whether justified or otherwise, and his sentence will be double what it would be if he were a Loyalist.
However much I may take issue with the lack of impartiality on the part of members of the Judiciary in the Six Counties, this is not at all as important as the source at which evidence will be taken in chambers or in court presided over by a member of the Judiciary. The Parliamentary Secretary to the Taoiseach interjected: "Really the judge from up there would not be doing much. He would only be presiding." I agree he will preside and his role will be that of chairman more than anything else, but that does not take away from the overall objection fair-minded people must have when they consider the source at which evidence will be taken, transcribed no doubt, carted down here and put in evidence before our courts. That evidence will be taken in 90 per cent of cases—and that is being conservative—from personnel of the RUC, and UDR, the Special Branch, the British Army, SAS, paid informers and other well wishers. There will be no disinclination to come forward with either true or false evidence to get at those who do not politically agree with them. That has been clearly demonstrated over the years.
This is the sad situation we can contemplate. Our courts will be abused. We will provide this sort of trial here against all the established practice in our courts over the years and we will do it on the basis that it can only be applied selectively to Nationalists or Catholics accused by the 6-county authorities. But the Loyalist will opt to go back to where he knows he will get a soft deal. The Nationlist or the Catholic will not be able to go back even to hear the evidence against him taken on commission. He will not go back because, no matter what guarantees are given, he will fear going back into the custody of the RUC who, in the first instance, will in all probability have been responsible for handing him across the Border, possibly on trumped up charges or untrue charges.
Remember, we are dealing here with people who helped in the internment round-up operation on 9th August, 1971, who allied themselves with the British troops, who had no legal authority at all to intervene but were never challenged, and who subsequently participated in the torture procedures of which the Government are well aware and in respect of which the Government have been pursuing the British Government in international courts, without so far arriving at any conclusion. The Government are far better aware than are the members of the public or I or anybody else in the House, in particular the Minister for Justice is fully aware, of the type of tortures, the inhuman treatment, the brutality that was used by the RUC in some of their interrogation centres together with and connived at by some of their high officers and in conjunction with the British Army.
These are the people who we are saying will give evidence before a discredited judicial functionary presiding in chambers or in court in the Six Counties. These are the people who will give the evidence that will be taken down from those proceedings and used in our courts without the basic, elementary and essential right to which every accused person is entitled on demand, namely, to be confronted by his accusers in open court at his trial and thus given the opportunity to refute their accusations should he wish to do so. That right is being totally ignored. While in certain circumstances it might conceivably be excused, it is a travesty of justice in every sense of the word that in the case of accused persons who we suspect will come before our courts under this Bill if it becomes law their accusers will, in fact, be the persons who will be giving the evidence and their accusers and those giving the evidence will be the same forces as perpetrated the tortures and the inhuman treatment and the brutalities that followed on the operation of internment some years ago.
I cannot credit that any government in this part of the country should attempt to do such a thing, even if they had extraordinarily good reasons for doing it and even if the end that they contemplated could in some way be accepted as justifying the means. In the case of this extraordinary departure from the normal procedures of justice, not only in this country but in most countries, no justification is advanced as to why extraordinary exceptions should be made in regard to the basic elementary right of an accused person to be confronted by his accusers and given the opportunity to cross-examine.
Can we get from the Government good and cogent reasons as to why an attempt should be made to deny accused persons in our courts this absolutely fundamental right which is long established and accepted as the right of an accused person? Can we get from the Government or their spokesmen any indication that there is clear evidence of a change in so far as the RUC, the UDA, the ex-B Specials, which they mainly are, Special Branch, British Army, or that they are different from what they were a year or five years ago? I am not aware of any change, and I would have as good an opportunity of recognising a change as most people in this House.
I would make this observation to the Minister and the Government as to the operations of the British Army as of now in regard to intimidation in the everyday movements of our people: there is one route from Dublin through the Six Counties that comes in for special treatment, that has been given special intimidatory treatment over the years and given it persistently at the present time. It is not the route to Belfast, as one might expect. It is the route that must be traversed by the people of the outpost of the Twenty-six Counties, my own county people and, of course, the people of Derry. It is through Moy Bridge and either Craigavon Bridge, if you live on the nationalist side of Derry city or Strabane Bridge if you live in Donegal. Why, I ask, has nothing been done about this? Why is it not obvious to the Government that there is discrimination and that this hold-up, this continuous, regular searching and delay being caused to our people from Derry and Donegal is a deliberate thing which is not applied to the people going back to Belfast but which is applied on that particular route because the people there are likely to be of a particular persuasion? This goes to show, if anything further were necessary, that the leopard has not changed its spots. We still have the institutional violence, and violence this is.
I would invite any member of this House to go unannounced and without special arrangements being made for his expeditious and safe passage through the Six Counties, to go there, particularly on a Friday evening or on a Sunday on which there is a big sports event south of the Border and he will see the queues right back to the other side of the Border and will experience the totally unnecessary delays that are occasioned, delays of up to two-and-a-half hours, never less than half an hour and on average up to an hour. Why is there special treatment on that route? Why are there the outposts built in concrete?
Why have special ramps been put down recently? Why is there all this paraphernalia provided by people to whom by what we are proposing in this Bill we will lend our aid to try on this side of the Border people whom they accuse of crimes on the Six Counties side of the Border?
In the prosecution the evidence will be given by members of the British occupation forces and the RUC, the paid informers and all the rest. Surely, we should be saying to these people: "Stop your discrimination. Stop harassing the people of Donegal which belongs to this 26-county Republic of Ireland. Stop trying to make those of us who live in Donegal, with all its attendant difficulties as a result of Partition, travel round by Sligo." That is why there is this concentrated, sustained, persistent effort at intimidating our people travelling through and, of course, to harass the people from Derry and indeed to intimidate them from coming South at all. This goes on today, did yesterday and will next week and next month. Still we are leaning over backwards to give to these occupation forces, to the Establishment in the Six Counties, something to which they are not entitled, which in fact is unfair and discriminatory in itself and will be selective in its application by virtue of the circumstances in which it has been framed. Far from getting any quid pro quo, we are having our noses rubbed in the dirt day-in-day-out by those same forces in the Six Counties.
As we know, of course, they are not averse to crossing the Border. Then we hear the usual old story that they did not know where the Border was. If they do not know where it is, it is time they were not there. There must be a rare lot of fools in the occupation forces based on the Border—with all their maps and equipment—that they can so frequently forget where the Border is and have safaris into the southern side of it. We make weak sounds of protest occasionally but not by any means always. I suppose we are given some sort of assurances that it was a mistake and will not happen again but, of course, it happens again and again. It is no mistake—it is made nine times out of ten—these deliberate crossings, whether with the purpose of provocation or otherwise is difficult to ascertain. But certainly the treatment at check-points on the route to Derry and Donegal is intimidatory, provocative and cannot in any way be set in the atmosphere this Government would appear to think exists in making this offer to the Establishment, to the British Government, or to both—it is hard to know these days who is who and where they operate.
We should not forget that we are dealing with a situation that has not arisen from any wrong acts on the part of the Nationalist people of the Six Counties but rather from the imposition on that same Nationalist population over many years of violence of all descriptions, not only institutional violence, as we are inclined to describe the operations and harassment by police and security forces, but physical violence also with no hope of redress. This has not occurred merely since 1969. It went on long before that. We look at the end product now and say that the men of violence in one section of the population are the root cause of it all and, if we can eradicate them, we shall eradicate the problem. That would be funny were it not so tragic. We could not be further from the truth in proposing to adopt that sort of attitude. We must go back and find out why such people came into being and why they must have the support of the minority of the Six Counties in order to carry on.
Why do we appear, in what we are proposing here, to be more British than the British themselves? Why do we wish, by our recognition of the institutions set up by a puppet Government in the Six Counties—through the operations of this Parliament—to give our seal in an official manner to the partition of our land never accepted by our people as an ultimate, lasting or just operation? Whether or not we like it, that is what we are doing. One may say the Treaty of 1922 did that. It provided for the Boundary Commission which ultimately outlined the actual delineation of the Border on a basis that contrived a majority for the future in order to keep the Loyalists in Government; they, in turn, taking their cue from that, by intimidation of every description, through violence of every type, including the denial of job opportunities, houses and so on, maintained their position of ascendancy. The Treaty was implemented. At least we can say, of those who signed it and supported it in this House, that they did it under circumstances in which they believed the alternative was a bloody war being imposed on them by the forces of the then much mightier empire than it is today.
Whether one agrees or disagrees with the creation of the situation in which we have got partition, at least it can be said of those people at that time they had that very large reason for doing so and for agreeing to it, even though it brought tragic consequences immediately after. We can say also, in extenuation of the acceptance of the Boundary Commission Report of 1925 —even though it was behind closed doors—that it was merely in the nature of a follow-on to acceptance of the Treaty by the Dáil in 1922.
But there is, and cannot be, any like excuse for a Parliament, established all those years, purporting to represent—and I deliberately say purporting to represent—the opinion of our people on this island as a whole. For them there is no excuse in this clear, final sell-out, and sell-out it can only be because we now propose in this Bill—even though some people in this House who will vote for it will not agree with it—to copper-fasten, recognise and accept that which our people have never done heretofore. Under the most extreme circumstances never before has there been an attempt, on behalf of the Irish people as a whole, to recognise that the Border is a proper or just thing. If one quibbles and says: "We are not recognising it in this Bill," I say that if we recognise, as we propose to recognise the courts of the Six Counties, the so-called peace-keeping forces of the Six Counties, then we must, without doubt, be recognising the sources from which they sprang. Willingly or otherwise, we are selling out as we have never sold out before.
I am quite sure that the majority of people of this country, regardless of their politics and of what we do here would not accept this. I do not believe that the majority of people of all of this island would condone this by their votes if it was put to them in the form of a referendum were that capable of being done.
Unfortunately and tragically it is all for nothing, meaningless, hopeless, and can only bring in its train further trouble and violence. It can have no other outcome. Why, then, do it? Why give credence to a discredited RUC that even now the minority will not recognise after all their suffering and hardship? They still do not see that police force as their police force, as an impartial police force, much less recognise the British Army or any branch of it as being impartial.
It is extraordinary that the man who was in charge of the regiment in Derry the day the massacre took place, Bloody Sunday, was not disciplined. On the contrary, he was decorated.