As I said earlier, I am opposing this Bill on principle because it consolidates and extends the scope of the repressive Offences Against the State laws which all of us, particularly my former colleague, Jack McQuillan, over many years have consistently opposed. In more recent years, up to a couple of years ago, this has been supported most eloquently and most convincingly by the very man who is now moving this piece of legislation—Deputy Cooney, the Minister for Justice, who condemned this type of repressive legislation and described it as such in the debate on the Criminal Justice (Amendment) Bill, 1972. He described it as infringing the fundamental basic freedoms which should be enjoyed in any democratic State. Most of the Ministers of the Government now introducing this law supported his and our stand against that type of law with varying degrees of hypocritical, cynical and empty rhetoric. Our then spokesman on the North, Deputy Cruise-O'Brien, the present Taoiseach, and the present Leader of the Labour Party, Deputy Corish, a very short time ago, condemned it as repressive, anti-democratic, illiberal and contrary to the civil liberties and as depriving citizens of their fundamental rights.
It is little wonder that the public have less and less regard and respect for politicians because it is quite obvious that the very powerful, prolonged, sustained opposition which was put up by the then Opposition here and in the other House was not sincerely felt opposition. It was not the serious opposition of serious democrats concerned for liberties, liberal attitudes, rights of individuals. It was the action of petty politicians anxious to score off the then Government and ready to take the first possible opportunity of reinforcing and consolidating this kind of law.
It is repressive without doubt. The most shocking comment expressive of the whole feeling implicit in the law was made by Senator Alexis FitzGerald last night when he made the frightening and to me horrifying threat that if terror is used then we will use greater terror.
That is not the kind of language which should be used by serious senior mature legislators in a society such as ours. To him this is the greater terror. It is surprising from Senator FitzGerald because most of us know that we can expect, usually, valuable worthwhile contributions from him on this kind of thing.
It is dangerous legislation. It is surprisingly dangerous legislation because there is so much around the world now, and historically in our own experience and in the experience of most of the imperialist countries, to show that repression or counter-terror is totally and utterly futile. It does not destroy. It does not destroy these kinds of movements. Last night the greatest single military force in the world was in the most humiliating way kicked out of Vietnam—a wonderful thing to see. They were kicked out not by a great army or by a more powerful army: they were kicked out by groups of tiny dedicated idealistic men with an ideological conviction which was greater than their fear of death, fear of torture or fear of the terror which the Americans tried to visit on them simply because they wanted to run their country in a particular way.
But it is a good example, the most recent example of the essential stupidity, and what is worse, the essential futility of the idea that repression destroys these kinds of movements. It does not do so. The surprising thing is that our Government—above all our Government—should have learned so little from the experience of our nation over the centuries in which we have so many times, so many generations of our people have, listened to this kind of thing—counter-terrorism, repressive legislation. It was no use. One of the greatest empires in the world was put out of Ireland by the guerrilla movement only 50 years ago—the British Empire.
Whether one looks around the world or whether one looks at our own history, it is quite remarkable to see men such as the Minister, such as the members of the Government and above all such as the Labour Party members of the Government, subscribing to this kind of legislation. It is probably true to say that it is the first time in the 50 years of the lifetime of the State in which a Labour Party have had a significant say in the introduction of this kind of repressive legislation. Always the party had avoided or opposed this kind of legislation. As far as I can recollect, at any rate before I was in the Labour Party, when we were fighting as independents, we could always depend on the Labour Party to oppose this kind of offence against the State legislation and this kind of repressive law.
In spite of the simplistic threats made against those of us who oppose this kind of law—that if you oppose this you are in favour of what the Leader of the House called the other night "knee-capping" assassinations, executions and so on—that is not the equation. He knows that. So do the Government. Those of us who oppose it do not favour these things. We recognise they have existed for a very long time. They will continue to exist no matter what kind of repressive law is brought in here until—this is the important thing—this Government or some Government decide to take the political steps, the political action which must be taken here in the South, before any serious dialogue can take place between the North and South, the Protestants and the Catholics, the Unionists and ourselves. We all know that. I do not know how long I have been saying that. Gradually I think it is becoming more and more widely accepted.
The first time this kind of law was introduced was in 1939, the offences against the State, anti-terrorist laws; 1940 brought another extension of it. There was more in 1969. These various extensions of repression are irremovable. The net result is to give our police, as Deputy O'Brien has said, more powers than any other State in Europe or North America, meaning that there has been more and more progressive deprivation of human rights because our successive Governments, Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and now regrettably the Coalition, have refused to face the political difficulties in domestic terms, the in-fighting or politics in the Republic in order to move towards providing the political solution of this problem.
This is totally cynical, this suggestion that this is a concern for the Northern Unionists. I share the view that it is cynical for the obvious reasons put forward by a number of the Opposition speakers—the delay in introducing it, the assumption that it will split the Opposition, the possibility that one could go to the country on a law and order issue—dangerously cynical insistence on continuing to deal with the in-fighting of politics down here and essentially to use the Northern question simply as part of the pawn to be manipulated in the game of Southern politics.
I am quite certain that that is the motivation behind this Bill. We know well the obvious kind of laws which should be introduced here, the laws that would not divide this part of the country, as this law will divide it on the question of the North for the first time. Everyone knows that all my political life, I have fought on these issues—freedom of conscience for the minority down here, the right to divorce, changes in the Constitution, the marriage order, the non-sectarian schools, this appalling division of our people into the two religious groupings which is such an integral part of the whole Northern problem which we are simply afraid to deal with, repeating again and again at such regular intervals the demonstration of our total subservience to the clerical oppression of this part of the State which the Unionist is justifiably frightened of.
How can the Leader of this Government, the Taoiseach, protest that he is seriously concerned for the North after the particularly cowardly decision made by him in relation to the contraception issue introduced by this Minister? At least he, due credit to him, tried to do something about it. I am not saying these things solve the problems in the North but they reduce the differences, and the reduction of differences comes mainly from us because it is we who want to solve and have said we want to solve the Northern problem. This is not just the National Coalition Government at fault now. It is successive Governments since the State was formed. All refused to face these very thorny, complicated problems, what Deputy Lynch once called the nettles that have to be grasped. The new Government have accepted the responsibility of dealing with these problems, and then we have the need to introduce repressive laws as a substitute for courageous political action.
As a democrat and a revolutionary socialist I have a particular vested interest in opposing this kind of legislation because I know quite well that these are the kinds of laws that are passed against people like myself when it suits the Government to decide that we are subversive and we are threatening the State. Those of us, whether we are trade unionists or political activists attempting to displace the established order—my personal ambition—must deplore this kind of law, the setting aside of concern for the rights of the individual before the court, the rights of the individual to jury trial and the rights of the individual to appeals against decisions taken, instead of the appalling arbitrary Special Criminal Court procedures which have so shocked many members of the judiciary of many other countries by the summary nature of the trials in respect of these alleged crimes and the very long sentences meted out by these courts.
As the Minister pointed out two years ago, when he was condemning this kind of legislation, this is the kind of law that was used against the farmers. That was the point made by Deputy Cooney when he was in Opposition. I am particularly interested in the liberals in our society whose liberalism does not survive the first serious pressure on their liberal attitudes, this setting aside of these freedoms. Because the farmers marched in the streets and protested and did not behave themselves, this was the kind of legislation that was used against them. I recall another occasion when the ESB workers went on strike and a number of us went with them on pickets against the law, challenging the law to put us in prison, because the law promised to put us in prison for picketing. That law was defeated and it was a very interesting exercise in protest by Parliament, led by the Labour Party incidentally.
The law was introduced in the morning and taken out in the evening by Mr. Lemass. It was an attempt to set aside the law at a time of social protest or protest against the failure of the Government to deal with the question of employment. It was a failure of the Government to deal with the question of employment. It was a failure to deal with the matter in a political way, but the simplest way is the oppressive way—lock them all up, put them in prison.
I was interested to hear Senator Russell talking about agreement between the two parts of the State on this issue. Is it not an appalling commentary on the type of people in Government both North and South that the one thing we can agree on is to open our jails and fill them with people who protest against organised society? It is its own commentary on the sterile bankruptcy of the people who govern us North and South and who have governed us for the last 50 years.
Another example, against which we all fought very hard, including the present Minister for Labour—I do not know whether the present person in the Minister's chair ever bothered his head about these things but certainly, Deputy Cooney, the Minister for Justice, did fight very hard with marvellous resilience, courage and the expert knowledge of the lawyer I am sure he is—was the Forcible Entry Act. Again the easiest thing to do was to lock these people up. They had nowhere to go, no homes for themselves or their children, pathetic creatures. All around them they saw these absurd office buildings going up, bank buildings, insurance buildings, all these things which it is such a delight to see the present Portuguese socialist government nationalising. Money was being spent on these buildings while our people were without homes, and squatting took place, as you recall. Instead of taking the political action they should have taken at that time, that is build more houses, the easy thing to do was lock them up, put them in jail.
This has been the pattern of our successive Governments. It is very sad, very depressing, very distressing, to think that a young, new nation should so rapidly have sunk back into the total obscurantist conservatism of our successive Governments over the years and end up with the situation where—I see the most recent tables show—we, in Ireland, have the lowest level of social, educational and health services, just below Britain, in all of the EEC countries. This is the 50 years of achievement, 50 years of failure. There is the sectarian legislation, the theocratic society, the total failure of our successive Governments to redistribute the enormous wealth that there is in this country. We see it again in relation to our mineral wealth, the failure of the Government to set aside their primary loyalty to a minority, the wealthy minority whom they represent in our society, their failure to put before everything, for the sake of our own people in the South as well as for the sake of the case it would make, nationally and internationally, the need to make the compelling case to the Northern Unionist Protestants that they have no reason to fear joining up with us and coming into a united Ireland.
We all know quite well that, internationally, nobody would insist on the Northerners coming into a united Ireland at the present time for the obvious reasons I have mentioned. It was for this reason that I felt that Sunningdale could not have worked. I never believed that it would work. The exultation shown by our negotiators at the end of it was completely misplaced. They assumed that everything was all right. There were no serious concessions on their part at all. There were all the various things that had to be done and should be done and none of them were they prepared to do. I remember discussing these things in my own party, the Labour Party, after making a speech once in Tramore in which I referred to the need to have a national debate on these conflicting issues, the issues that divided us North and the South—all the dangerous subjects of contraception and divorce, non-sectarian schools and the rights of the minority in marriage, and so on. All I asked for was the need for a national debate; I was not coming down on any side, although people mostly know what my views are.
There was an interesting debate on that when I was reprimanded for having made that speech, asking for that debate. I can understand the objections of the people who are conscientiously opposed to these subjects or to my views on such subjects, but the most depressing of all were the objections made by two people in particular, who said that they agreed completely with the views held by me on these subjects, that these were the attitudes accepted by most liberal European societies, that they are inevitable subjects for discussion and debate and settlement before there can be any serious approach to Northern unity, but that they were dangerous subjects which should not be discussed in public. The two people who took this view were the Minister for Posts and Telegraphs, Deputy Cruise-O'Brien, and the Minister for Industry and Commerce, Deputy Keating. They agreed with me, but said I must not talk about them in public.
This is the kind of cynical politics, the politics of playing politics, which has this society where it is now, taking up one attitude in public, total moral cowardice—"poltroonery" is the word used—and another in private. If the Minister looks around the world or studies history, he will see that it is the political solution he should be trying to bring into this House, that those are the laws or the amendments to our Constitution which we should be discussing and not this kind of repressive law.
I was interested at the time of Sunningdale particularly in the feeling our negotiators appeared to have that they had the Northern Unionists where they wanted them because of the complacency of the British negotiators at the time who were probably pretty sick of the whole question, but they reckoned without the UWC and the UWC strike. I do not share the views put forward here by many people about the UWC strike. It is a misjudgment of the position and it is the basic and fundamental misjudgment of the position in relation to Northern unity which we continue to make. To me the UWC action was a parallel with the NICRA protest earlier on, the protest of the Catholic minority against repressive laws in the North.
The NICRA protest was justified in every way by events. We all know that life is hell for the Catholic minority in the North of Ireland. It must be an appalling experience, humiliating, degrading, frightening, insufferable, the contemptuous way in which they are treated. This we all understand. Equally, the UWC felt that they were going to take their place as a minority in a greater society with the same kind of sectarian discrimination, in that case imposed by us.
Sunningdale did not work and this was to be part of the Sunningdale agreement. I fail to see how that can be used at all as part of the case for bringing in this Bill. It simply does not make sense and most other speakers have dwelt on it at considerable length and leave me in no doubt at all that, whatever the motivation is, it was not Sunningdale. The UWC was particularly important from the Minister's point of view and he should not underestimate many of these indicators of the change in where power lies in our society, in all European societies and world societies.
Power is changing, parliament is terribly discredited. Very few people take parliament very seriously in any of our countries, France, Germany, West Germany, Britain or Ireland, and less so. The Minister can ignore this kind of development at his peril. Other indicators incidentally are the maintenance workers' strike, and the tankers' the other day. These are all very important indicators as to the declining power of parliament. It is all right for us people to sit here and say what we like, discuss any Bill that we want to, make any proposal that we wish to; let us remember the euphoric elaborate paraphernalia of the whole Sunningdale Agreement, the negotiations, the fear of security guards, and the pronunciamentos every so often from the various negotiators, then the whole thing set aside by the UWC. A number of workers said it simply would not be allowed to work and that was the end of it.
This is a thread running through the whole of western Europe, and to a considerable extent the greater part of the world, the emerging countries, this changing emphasis on the place in which power lies. The UWC was a remarkable achievement in that way in setting aside all the deliberation of these people who got together and thought that they really had power. Similarly I think the Minister is making a great mistake in thinking that simply by passing this law he is going to change anything very significantly, except for the worst quite possibly. One has got to remember that this kind of law has been in operation since 1939, for 35 years. What has it achieved? In every decennial period there is some kind of trouble in the North or in the South or both. It has not ended what the young men chose to call their freedom movement. They are not afraid of going to gaol.
We are moving into very difficult times with the imminent collapse of the British economy, which is bound to affect us here, and quite obviously the Government are going to be faced with great problems of unemployment and inevitably worker protests of one kind or another. We are going to get more of this action by trade unionists, protesting effectively against the noncontrollable spiralling cost of living, the men who stopped the country the other day. They were all people of extraordinary maturity and sense of responsibility, but they felt this was the only action they had. This is the first of many of these kinds of actions. The Minister for Labour, regrettably, shamefully told us on the television that he would not hesitate to take whatever action was necessary, and so on. This again comes back to the repressive laws that are brought in here by the Minister now in support and consolidation of the Offences Against the State laws which he told us himself were used against the farmers when it suited the Government at the time. That is a great danger, and I was completely shocked to hear a trade unionist last night, Senator Harte, making a comparison between a GAA club and the Offences Against the State Act. You have to repress a GAA membership just like you give people eight or ten years in Portlaoise. That kind of comparison was distressing to listen to. Either the man is a fool or he is completely dishonest. He must understand the enormous diffence and the danger implicit in this kind of legislation for court judges. It is quite obvious that the Labour Ministers now totally dominate Fine Gael in the National Coalition. This phrase, meeting terror with a greater terror, is the dominating motif of the National Coalition Government used by Senator FitzGerald last night. The Minister for Industry and Commerce made it quite clear that strike action would not continue to be tolerated, that the strike would be broken. I do not think anyone had any doubt about what he had in mind, and if not this time another time. The Government have failed to take political action in these things. The Fine Gael part of the Government are a very conservative party and never pretended to be anything else. I do not care what Government are in power, Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil or Labour; I am only concerned with the particular ideology, with the political attitudes people have in power. It is quite clear that the conservative social and economic policies of the Government simply cannot solve the great problems facing us and therefore more and more of this kind of repressive law will become inevitable. Therefore I believe that all trade unionists, all members of the Labour Party, should oppose this legislation, not only for its intrinsic, illiberal, anti-democratic implication for the whole country but, in particular, in the context of the very dangerous period ahead of all of us, particularly those who are involved in social protest or in politics.
Senator FitzGerald talked about the IRA programme last night, a question of extraordinary difficulty, one in which it is easy to over-simplify the issues involved. He said that they are protesting against 1916 and the fact that we have established our own Government and therefore intellectually they have a very weak case. That is the sum of his arguments against them. That is the danger of oversimplification. We have a Government here but we have not one in the Six Counties. There is a British Government there. There is a British Army of occupation in the northern part of the country.
Nobody in his senses could agree with the killings and shootings. At the same time, one can understand the sense of frustration experienced by young people educated in our schools by Marists and Christian Brothers and the Jesuits who have learned of the history of our country and been told that as long as there is an army of occupation here, the struggle must go on until the British Army are removed. The only way the British Army were moved from anywhere was when they were put out by force. This was the general thesis which we took from our schools—teachers, brothers, lay-teachers. In that context, it seems unfair to talk about these young men as murderers and criminals. They are the product of our schools, colleges and universities. When these young people achieve various advances in art, literature, education, administration, business, politics, we are very proud of them. We say then that this is the product of our society, it is the kind of society we want to preserve. And yet in a completely callous manner, we reject these other youngsters who are equally the products of that culture and who respond by going north to try to get rid of the British Army by the only way they know.
It is clear to me that politicians have failed. No serious progress has been made by any of the parties, the last débâcle being Sunningdale, and now the appalling prospects of the Convention elections face us. These will not solve anything either. There were various political solutions put forward for these difficult intractable problems but the politicians refused to take the courageous action needed in the different aspects of our social and economic life in order to eliminate the need for anything but political action.
Surely it is possible for one to see something of the case that these young men make for their military action. It is true that amongst them there are —as there are in every army—psychopaths, people who enjoy killing people because of their personality problems, people who are anti-authoritarian. There are also some who are highly idealistic and revolutionary and feel that this is the best way to serve Ireland. We taught them to believe this and we must not forget it.
I am sure the Minister would agree that no single step has been made— apart from that attempted by him on the Contraception Bill—to establish the reality of a pluralist society, the precondition to some kind of reduction in the difference between us. That failed in the most disgraceful fiasco by the action of the Taoiseach. Is it not true that no successful step has been taken by this Government or by their predecessors?
The young Irishman is in a particularly difficult position because of the indoctrination in the schools to secure freedom for Ireland and remove the British Army from Ireland. I feel very deeply about this. In addition, he has had the extraordinary experience of having watched the whole world watch Ireland, and, in particular, the period of the guerilla warfare of the Black and Tan war. He has to watch all around the world young people like himself, in the various societies, in the various countries, with the same problem of achieving freedom from some kind of imperialist domination, adopting the pattern adopted by the young Irishmen of 50 years ago of guerilla warfare in order to achieve freedom. It is now called "The War of the Flea" and was used with enormous success by Mao Tse Tung, that is, the tiny group striking, getting out of the way and eventually wearing down the powerful enemy, as the Americans have been worn down into submission in Cambodia and in Vietnam.
Their mentors in the Philippines, in Malaya, in Greece, in Algeria, in Morocco, in Cuba, in the new liberated Kenya, countries of that kind, know little or nothing about Ireland except that there was this liberation movement here and that this is how they fought. If the young lad is indoctrinated in the first instance by our teachers, watches this happening, and watches freedom evolving throughout the world, it is very difficult to blame him for taking up the pattern laid down for him by his forefathers.
From the Minister's point of view, he should dwell on this question very carefully, because all of those countries I mentioned—some of them enormous and some of them tiny—have one common denominator: the attempt by repressive laws to destroy these various guerilla movements. With a couple of exceptions, there was a total failure of repressive laws, the use of the police, the army, the old reliance on armoured cars, tanks, machine guns and so on. This is not the way. No more than Parliament here, these people have not the power they had. If they watched the total humiliation of the enormously powerful, greatest military power in the world, with its tail between its legs getting out of Vietnam as quickly as it could, hunted by groups of very brave, dedicated men on bicycles, using enormous ingenuity and courage, I hope they learned from that. The Minister should learn from these things. It is very simple to do this kind of business. But he and his colleagues were hunted two or three days ago in just the same way—hunted by 600 or is it 1,200 men? A general strike and a complete shutdown of our society. Does that not frighten the Minister? Does that not demonstrate to the Minister his total impotence against determined people, idealogically convinced people? He can bring in any law he likes, but he will have to drive them or pay up. He paid up and he will do it again.
The Americans, the British, the French, the Belgians and the Dutch all found that repression does not work. An ex-guerilla leader tried political solutions in the Philippines and destroyed the guerilla movement there simply by introducing serious significant land reform proposals.
Most of the European countries are attempting to win in this way, not only here. I regarded the maintenance men's strike as the great watershed in militant trade union action to destroy the power of the Government. The Government will have to face that one day. This will represent the great conflict. The same is happening in West Germany—the same kind of anti-guerilla forces, anti-guerilla activity, anti-terrorist laws, all these emotive and evocative words. But they are not being effective. The technique is completely different. There are no longer these total confrontations which the unarmed and underarmed minority could not possibly win. Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, all of them have shown how futile is this kind of thing—the Minister sending his army out to destroy this handful of ideologically convinced revolutionaries. He does not have to look to Cuba, he does not have to look to Malaya, the Philippines, China, Vietnam or Cambodia. Look at the North, look at the British Army there, look at the RUC, the SAS, the enormous military equipment deployed all over the North. In 1969, when we were up there, I remember some of the British soldiers telling Gerry Fitt or somebody like that that once they moved out from Derry and Belfast they could not possibly control a serious guerilla movement. This has been proved. Make no mistake, the number of troops and the slowing down of the guerilla activity is not important. The essence of the guerilla activity is that it goes on and on. The longer it lasts, the more they like it. It is the cost of keeping an army in the field which the imperialists' power cannot stand.
The Minister will come up against this too: keeping his Army on the Border and keeping his Army hunting people all over Ireland, manning Portlaoise Jail and so on. He is dealing with a very dangerous possible development in our society. He is edging towards the same extraordinary, foolish mistake made by the British in their simplistic, stupid assumption. After their experience of failure in their total loss of their empire, how can they continue to believe in this anti-terrorist legislation, the machine guns and searches? This is exactly what the guerilla movements want to create the sea in which Mao's fish swim. This is what the Minister is going to do. It is he who is going to alienate the Irish people who may be opposed to or neutral about this at present. If he uses the Army to search and arrest, we may catch one, three or even five people but the number of people who are antagonised as a result of this is the secret of the guerilla's success.
In spite of the extraordinary increase in anti-guerilla repressive laws which Ministers brought in in Western Germany, it has not stopped the Bader Meinhoff or the 2nd June factions, or the KPD. This is an extremely leftwing revolutionary Maoist Communist Party, which in the municipal elections during the time Peter Lorenz was arrested, got 10,000 votes in a West Berlin surburb, in spite of all the repressive laws. At the same time, there is a very considerable body of opinion now supporting these people throughout Western Germany. Oddly enough, there is growing support for them among professional people, lawyers, doctors, nurses, people who themselves are becoming alienated from the whole political system.
The main message wherever you look is the failure of repressive laws. If there is political action that can be taken, in Heaven's name let the Minister and the Government have the courage to take it and learn by the mistakes of the British. So far fortunately we have been spared the appalling things that have been happening around the world, such as kidnappings. How do they strike the Minister for Justice, because he is the one who is eventually going to have to deal with it? Does he not feel somewhat apprehensive about the simplistic assumption that a repressive law will solve everything for him? It is not as simple as that. I referred earlier to the abduction of Peter Lorenz in West Berlin before the election, the appalling Olympic blood bath, the various diplomatic places that have been taken over by the PLM—The Palestine Liberation Movement—and the extreme left groups in various countries. We no longer have the ordinary confrontation which can be dealt with by sending out a few policemen to baton them on the head. That is not the way it happens any more.
The most interesting development from my point of view in relation to the Republican movement is the politicisation that has taken place in recent months and years. This movement used to be a right wing sectarian neo-facist organisation. For obvious reasons, it is quite obvious now that it is moving quite systematically across to the left and is developing its own links with the various European left movements. Therefore it becomes much more serious than the Minister appears to realise. However, my experience has been that it has to happen first before anybody takes any notice. For what it is worth I ask the Minister to do some serious thinking about the real problem facing him in the context of the rapidly deteriorating economic situation and the new approach to the solution of our problems by the left in these various countries.
A number of speakers have emphasised the extraordinary decision to give credence in our courts to the very men whom our Attorney General is at present indicting in the European Court in Strasbourg for torture, hooding, beating, harassment of various kinds, the appalling sensory deprivation, use of sensory deprivation, and cruel brutality of various kinds. On the one hand we are accusing these people of these terrible crimes against innocent people or people in captivity, and, on the other, we are opening our courts to their evidence against citizens of the State. How can we reconcile this conflict of attitudes and behaviour?
The other night on a Féach programme a number of you no doubt saw the priest explaining how indifferent the RUC are in relation to the Catholic sectarian killings, or the British Army are, in relation to the Catholics killed at the present time in the North. Austin Currie complained about the police, the RUC, in their failure to deal seriously with the various incidents of harassment, assassination and murder, brutality of different kinds. How can these people be given access to our courts? Why should they be given access to our courts? Merlyn Rees in the House of Commons recently gave figures to show that between January, 1970, and January, 1975, there were 1,345 complaints made against the RUC alleging assault; of these 1,006 were referred to the Attorney General and prosecutions were instituted in 31 and convictions secured in eight— conviction rate 0.17. There were more than 400 cases of alleged brutality to prisoners documented since 1971, and there were no convictions. At the present time the RUC are accused before the European Commission of Human Rights in Strasbourg of 130 cases of torture.
The Northern Community Relations Commission have accused the RUC of open collaboration with the UDA in putting Catholics out of their homes in White Abbey, Mount Pottinger. Recently, on January 31st, the RUC allegedly brutally beat Peter McKenna in Coalisland police station. The National Council for Civil Liberties in England have attacked the British anti-terrorist laws and said that they are simply being used to harass Irish people in Britain. These are laws parallel with the laws which we have introduced in order to satisfy the British.
I have watched politics for a long time now and watched politicians do extraordinary things, but it is a very, very long time since I have seen a group of politicians like the members of the present Government show such total cynicism, total indifference to any sort of politically moral standards or values and such consistent cowardice in the face of their responsibilities as a Government to deal with the very serious problem of the whole question of the North of Ireland. The real danger here is that the civil war, which is now at least limited to the North, could spread down here. This is the kind of provocative legislation which is not justified in any sense no matter which way one looks at it. Whether one looks at it as a trade unionist, member of the republican movement, nationalist, or internationalist, effectively it is the ending of the right of pleading. The political action is before the courts, internationally-accepted convention, and represents the cowardly way for the Government out of their full responsibilities. I hope they do not come to regret it. More important, I hope that our people do not find that they have made a very serious blunder in attempting to bring this Bill through the House.
