I support this Bill which Senator Ross is sponsoring. I was interested in the speeches made by Senator Ryan and Senator Durcan. They have both shown how hard it is to be definite with regard to the measures to be taken in the case of capital crime and also our attitudes to capital punishment. We heard Senator Ryan pointing out that he supported the abolition of capital punishment in the past and why he felt it was important that it should at least be retained on the Statue Book at present.
Although I take a contrary view, I respect the integrity of his position on this and I can understand the reasons he has outlined for his position. Nevertheless I was more than convinced by the argument put forward by Senator Durcan in relation to the need to look at it, and re-look at it, and to contemplate the possibility of a change in attitude in a very difficult area where it is difficult to be definite. I come from a part of this island, as Senators well know, where there has been a considerable number of murders and assassinations. Three people in my own home were assassinated.
Prisoners held for long periods in Northern prisons have found that time has affected their attitudes and has brought about a feeling or a desire to repent, shall we say, what was done, to go out into society with a new motivation and try to redress some of the misery they wrought by their assassinations. I am thinking in particular of a young loyalist prisoner who has admitted in correspondence that he is in there for murder. I am also thinking of a young republican. Great work has been done in recent times by prison chaplains who deal with men who in the solitariness of prison have had to confront themselves. As their act rises in their consciousness eventually to haunt them as they are no longer able to maintain the justification they had when they performed the original killing they are seeking some way out. Through the chaplains, the priests and the parsons who have a deep, deep and sensitive undertaking of what has taken place, these people have had a change of heart and a renewal in their spirit which makes them genuinely repentant and gives them the potential to emerge back into society again as useful citizens.
I know that that is not the position of all people who commit murder. Should we not address ourselves more to the psychological and redemptive aspects of the rehabilitation process of those who, for one reason or another, either political or criminal, have committed murder? I think in particular tonight of Mrs. Cobb who lost her husband and who wrote to the assassin of her husband offering her forgiveness. That is a very hard thing for people to understand who have not suffered in a similar fashion. Nevertheless it does allow us to hope. It also allows us to bring into the debate the concept of mercy, of forgiveness, of an understanding that it is possible for people to repent and, if and when they are liberated from imprisonment, to hand back to society something which it lost as a result of their actions.
We must now consider those actions. Let us look at the social side first. Increasingly in Ireland young people who have gone through the whole process of education find themselves cornered particularly in our larger towns and cities. They are cornered without power to participate in society. They are cornered without employment and without an opportunity to do creative work. In short they see the development of space technology and an opening up of the heavens while, at the same time, where they live they feel the social space squeezing in all round them and they lash out to deal with this frustration gap between the expectation which has been kindled by the new technology, and particularly by the media, and the reality of living in their own communities. They try to crash through this frustration barrier. Twice in the course of this year, when this frustration led to these youngsters trying to crash through the barriers, they were shot dead.
It seems likely that murder and associated crimes will be on the increase rather than on the decrease. Will they be adequately dealt with through the threat of death rather than addressing ourselves to those things which are involved in promoting the hope and prospect of life? Civilisation in my book is the affirmation of life from the very moment it starts until death, even though we live in the knowledge that life as we know it comes to an end some day. The question I would ask both of the State and of the individual involved in the mutilation or murder of others, or in the capital punishment of others, is when we violate the integrity of another human being, even when we have the sanction of the law behind us, and we are legitimised in our action by the State, do we not also diminish ourselves in the act or in our association with the act?
If we take it at individual level, it is inevitable that because we have a shared humanity an act of violation results in feelings of guilt which many of us can suppress by many devices, not the least of which is that we are doing it on behalf of the State in which we live, in the uniform of the State which we serve, or because the forces to which we are opposed are anti-social, anti-national, and so on. We cling to any falsification of the other man's humanity that we can justify any act of violence towards him. Now granted that legitimacy is important, at a time like this in a country riven by dissension both national and social, but that legitimacy begs certain other questions as to what it is based on and to what extent all the citizens have reasonable access to the opportunity which exists within the State which seeks legitimacy for acts involved in the keeping of law and order.
We must then ask ourselves how do we deal with any guilt once it arises in our consciousness and we are no longer able to suppress it. This certainly applies to the man in prison, but equally it arises in a collective sense in a nation or society which seeks a solution to the problem of violence, particularly violence ending in the killing of members of that society.
If we could be certain that capital punishment would be a sufficient deterrent to killing and murder then the retention of capital punishment would seem to me to have some justification. I do not think that people can argue that the retention of capital punishment has produced the effect desired.
Let us now make a distinction between murder and killing. Senator Ryan said that it was right that one would, in a final analysis, defend oneself at one's front door. Certainly there are few of us who would not take that point of view. One has to make the distinction between defending oneself with a view to a defence of life in the home and undertaking a deliberate premeditated act to ensure that the attacker is killed in the process of one's defence. It makes all the difference in the world in my opinion in dealing with an attacker and, if necessary, wounding him in order to defend life in one's own home or community and making a determined effort to ensure that there is absolutely no possible way in which the attack can be continued by ending the life of the attacker. As somebody has said already, it is a very final act. It is difficult, as I have already mentioned, to redeem such finality, certainly adequately, in this life although I believe it is possible.
I would ask Senators to consider also the point that Senator Ross made about the need to incarcerate anyone for 40 years — the mandatory sentence. Anyone who has read about the imprisonment of Rudolph Hess in Spandau Prison must surely be appalled that in spite of the heinous crimes to which he gave his name that 40 years on an old man is still isolated, almost in solitary confinement, for crimes against humanity. Have we not got enough humanity to recognise that there comes a time when enough is enough and the man should be set free? If anyone feels, as I do, that Hess should have been set free, I believe it would be inconsistent to say that we can support the death penalty.
The perspective of treason, one of the items mentioned in the Bill, changes as time moves on. What was treasonable in the Ireland of the 1912-22 period would certainly not be treasonable today, and for very good reason. What is treasonable in concept in Northern Ireland at this moment I hope will not be treasonable in years to come. It comes back to Senator Durcan's point that it is difficult. I accept that to be definite. We may be dealing with changing perceptions of changing times. Nevertheless, it is very important that we do not react to the increasing violence by which we are surrounded by retaining this force which the State in the past has deemed necessary because I believe it is inevitable in the changed social climate of today that execution is bound to lead to reaction. We are going through a period of fundamental change. We are entering a new era. People are no longer prepared to do as they are bid, so to speak. There are new social groupings. There is a demand for a new social community politic. We must look at the problem carefully and be certain, if we are going to retain this Act, that we are not retaining an Act which will alienate further many sections of the deprived, underprivileged, frustrated people who now live with so much dissatisfaction and confusion in our towns and cities.
There is another matter that I wish to raise. In a country without a death penalty the onus is on the State to promote life and prevent death. Let us be clear that once this death penalty goes it has a significant impact on the effect of hunger strike. I mention that so that we do not overlook it. I mention it particularly because of the very painful process of rethinking that I had to do at the time of the Republican hunger strike in the North. At that time I held that while there could be no more justification for hunger strike to the death there were nevertheless political, psychological and social reasons for it, that no democratically elected Government should cave into the threat of blackmail by the threat of death. The dilemma was that we did not know until it was too late whether we were dealing with death or not.
Once it becomes clear that one is dealing with death then in a country without a death penalty the onus is clearly on the Government and on the Establishment to promote life and prevent death. Just as I understand my obligation as a doctor in a casualty department when confronted by a person who has affirmed that he wants to leave this earth through suicide I would have the option to decide whether to save a life or let that person have his choice. It has that aspect which we need to think about, particularly in Ireland.
We have heard the history from Senator Ross of the gradual dilution of the death penalty in Ireland in the 1964 debate, the 1981 debate and how the 1981 debate failed to come to fruition. When we look to the future, if we have the death penalty it will rarely be carried out. If we do not have a death penalty and murder occurs — remember murder is the premeditated, unlawful killing of one human being by another — we will be forced to address ourselves, perhaps more imaginatively than we have in the past, to the restructuring of Irish society, so that a pro-life philosophy, a pro-life experience is something that can be shared by all. We will be looking much more acutely, particularly as a result of the Northern experience and as a result of the experience of the chaplains in the prisons, to how we can help people who have committed the most heinous crimes to live with themselves as best they can and to come out with a message to the rest of us about what it is necessary to do and why they were placed or allowed themselves to be placed in the position that they committed the crime which they will carry as their own sentence to their graves. I have no hesitation in supporting this Bill. I trust that the remarks which have been made about the untimeliness of it will be put in some perspective. Some of us, perhaps, do not have enough time to look at our timing and when we get an opportunity and are asked if we wish to support something which seems to be right we take it on the spur of the moment. Perhaps that sounds naive but nevertheless it is a fact of life.