I begin by congratulating the Minister on bringing this incredibly important legislation before us. In doing so, he is following in the footsteps of another great Minister for Justice who introduced legislation in 1964 to abolish the death penalty for all but three categories of offences. I refer, of course, to Mr. Charles J. Haughey whose reforming zeal in his many ministries was ever evident. I say this legislation is incredibly important because it is.
If the Bill is passed and the amendment is carried, the State will no longer be officially involved in the revengeful taking of life. However, I cannot say it is timely because the legislation should have been passed long ago in what we claim to be a civilised country. I am pleased we are becoming more civilised daily, because a great Christian existentialist, Nikolai Aleksandrovich Berdyaev, said that the condition of people's moral consciousness may be gauged in a sense by their attitude to capital punishment. As we move towards the elimination of this barbarous archaic custom, I hope we will take one step upward to a higher plain of civilisation.
It is all too easy to give into the demands of those who call for the retention of capital punishment. I can understand their fears and empathise with those members of our peacekeeping forces and security forces who, from time to time, may come face to face with a gangster or terrorist who, because of madness, greed or adherence to some misguided philosophy, remorselessly guns down one of their number. The Garda Síochána, in particular, have lost men in such circumstances and have called, understandably, for the retention of the death penalty.
The death penalty is a punishment that is intolerable to the imagination. If one cares to contemplate this, one will be forced to agree it is a public sin of sloth. Why do those who call for the retention of capital punishment do so? Their principal argument is that it has value as an example where the State does not hang people to punish them but to intimidate by a terrifying example those who might be tempted to imitate their actions. They claim society does not hang people for revenge, it merely protects itself.
I put it to the House that there exists not one whit of scientific evidence to support the claim that the existence on the Statute Book of a law requiring capital punishment, whether as a reality or a threat, will stop an angry, insane or psychopathic person committing a murder. I also put it to the House that most of the Irish people do not believe the execution of a convicted murderer or someone guilty of treason has much value as an example. If they really believed this, why are there not public executions which would be filmed and repeatedly shown on television? That is where all the potential murderers would learn from example. Of course, people no longer believe this. We no longer hang people in public or in private, nor would we agree to the publishing in our daily newspapers pictures of a condemned man swinging from a noose. If we really believed or subscribed to the idea of capital punishment being used as an example to all, surely we would be hanging people in the middle of Croke Park, where there is seating capacity for thousands. People would be invited from near and far, refreshments would be served, the whole family could attend, children could come along for the day and soon no more horrific crimes would be committed.
Do we really believe this? We should not speak any more about the effectiveness of the death penalty as an example. While the scenario I sketched may appear to us in Ireland as unreal, it is not as far-fetched as it seems. Closed circuit television is used in the United States of America to view people as they go through the throes of the death penalty.
The death penalty is carried out in public in many countries. An article by Patrick Comerford called "When the state kills" in The Irish Times on Thursday, 17 August 1989, stated:
In many countries the death penalty is carried out in public. In Nigeria, where many prisoners have been publicly shot, thousands have come to witness the spectacle. In China, public executions are common despite being pro hibited by law. In Saudi Arabia, the corpses of those beheaded are displayed in public for up to an hour. Public executions are staged in many countries as a deterrent against crime, but research carried out in the United States [surprisingly enough] suggests that these executions may have the opposite effect, brutalising society and causing more violence.
Men, women and even children are executed around the world. They are hanged, shot, electrocuted, gassed or poisoned. In seven countries – Iran, Mauritania, North Yemen, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and the United Arab Emirates – certain prisoners are stoned to death, usually for adultery. Beheading by sword is used in at least five countries – Mauritania, North Yemen, Qatar Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Several blows are sometimes needed to sever the head, depending on the weight of the sword and the strength and accuracy of the executioner, and shooting by firing squad does not make it any quicker because, as it is an easier target, a squad may be told to aim at the body rather than the head. In Taiwan, a prisoner was found to be breathing over an hour after the first two volleys had been fired.
Execution still happens in many countries in public. For example, between 1983 and 1989, 900 people were executed in Nigeria, many of them in front of huge crowds, including children. In Iraq, more than 2,000 executions have taken place during the past 20 years. In Iran, since the revolution, thousands have been executed. Some of these have been carried out in public and the victims were shot, hanged or stoned. The article I mentioned earlier also describes a stoning. It states:
According to one eye witness account of a stoning in Iran, a lorry "deposited a large number of stones and pebbles beside the waste ground and then two women were led to the spot, wearing white sacks over their heads." The women were "enveloped in a shower of stones and transformed into two red sacks", according to the eye witness. The wounded women fell to the ground and the revolutionary guards smashed their heads in with a shovel to make sure they were dead.
George Bernard Shaw said:
Criminals do not die by the hands of law; they die by the hands of other men. Assassination on the scaffold is the worst form of assassination because there it is invested with the approval of society. It is a deed, they teach us, not the name we give it. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their kind.
It is a compelling thought. I do not believe the argument that execution acts as a deterrent and I do not subscribe to the idea of capital punishment as an example. Countries which use it have not reduced crime or civil unrest – sometimes, the opposite appears to be the case. For example, executions in South Africa during the last decade before Nelson Mandela took over averaged approximately 100 a year – sometimes the figure rose to 200 a year. The death penalty in South Africa was mandatory for murder. This included conspiracy to murder and even being present in a crowd when murder was committed. Yet, the crowds gathered ominously in that beleaguered bastion of apartheid at that time. Far from being afraid, their resolve was strengthened although the death penalty was in place.
In the United States, approximately 2,000 prisoners are on death row awaiting execution while lawyers get rich from appeals and counter appeals. This is nothing short of barbarity. It is interesting to note that 50 years ago, on 21 November 1951, the late Seán MacBride said in Dáil Éireann that it was "probably no exaggeration to say that the concept of capital punishment had its origin in barbarism." Capital punishment cannot intimidate a man who does not know he will commit a murder. It will not intimidate a man who deliberately sets out to perform a pre-meditated murder. Arthur Koestler related a story from the time when pickpocketing was punishable by death in England. When a pickpocket was being hanged, other pickpockets worked the crowd.
Statistics during the first 50 years of the last century show that of 250 men hanged in England, 170 had previously attended one or even two public executions. As late as 1886, from a total of 167 men condemned to death in Bristol prison, 164 had attended at least one execution. These facts speak for themselves. Other statistics show that in the countries that have abolished the death penalty, the incidence of crime remains the same. It neither increases nor falls. It appears safe to conclude that there is no connection whatsoever between the existence of capital punishment and crime. The death penalty does not intimidate anybody.
It is true that nothing proves that the death penalty is exemplary. It is certain that thousands of murderers have not been intimidated by it, but one cannot know who has been intimidated by such a penalty. Consequently, nothing proves that it does not serve as an example. Some people are willing to allow the penalty that involves the ultimate forfeiture of the condemned man. Yet, the exercise of this privilege by society, that is, a fixing of the man on the definitive rigidity of death, is based on nothing more than unverifiable possibility. There are other objections – capital punishment brutalises us all. William Makepeace Thackeray went to see a man being hanged and wrote On Going To See A Man
Hanged. He said:
Blood demands blood. Does it? The system of compensation might be carried on ad infinitum, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, as by the old Mosaic law. Why, because you lose your eye, is it that your opponents must be extracted? Where is the reason for the practice? Knowing that revenge is not only evil but useless, we have given up on minor points. Only to the last, we stick firm. I came away from Snow Hill that morning with a disgust for murder, but it was for the murder I saw done. I pray to Almighty God to cause this disgraceful sin to pass from among us and cleanse our land of blood.
I pray that our lust for revenge will not be satisfied by the taking of a life. All human life is sacred. Only God can give life and only God should take it away. Even Leonardo da Vinci said:
And thou, man, who by these my labourers dost look upon the marvellous works of nature, if thou judges it to be an atrocious act to destroy the same, reflect that it is an infinitely atrocious act to take away the life of man.
We see daily the taking of life in the name of peace. Disregard for the life of another is exemplified par excellence in the systematic murder daily of thousands of innocent people in our so-called civilised world. I refer to the unborn, the young nestling in their mothers' wombs who are systematically poisoned or sucked out in pieces, their tiny bodies ending mutilated in the refuse sacks of modern, sterile medical clinics. Their lives are ended almost as soon as they have begun. We should not add to this disregard for human life. We should end, once and for all, this barbarism.
Seán MacBride was a distinguished lawyer and he did not lightly refer to capital punishment as barbarism. I stress the barbarity of the act because I want people to appreciate that when a man is hanged, he is hanged in their name and on their behalf, as Fr. Austin Flannery said, "most obviously so in a democracy". We would all share the responsibility if a hanging occurred. It is an awesome responsibility.
We claim to revere human life, yet in the name of the law, we may take it. The great Quaker reforming politician, John Bright, said:
A deep reverence for human life is worth more than a thousand executions in the prevention of murder and is, in fact, the great security of human life. The law of capital punishment, whilst pretending to support this reverence, does in fact tend to destroy it.
What of all the innocents who died on the gallows? We think of the execution of William Orr, whose innocent body swung from the gallows in Carrickfergus on 14 October 1797. He was a United Irishman, a champion of northern Presbyterian patriots. His execution was one of the darkest blots of the administration of English rule in our country. In our day, there have been many summary executions which, although lacking in the panoply of the courtroom, were nevertheless executions carried out at the behest of the State. Everyone asks what would have been the outcome if the Guildford Four had been hanged? The reply would probably be "too late, too bad".
The State has an awesome responsibility where it can decide to snuff out someone's life. The person may later be proved innocent of the crime of which he or she was originally accused. This awesome responsibility does not sit well upon my shoulders and I do not want to be a part of it. It is important to speak openly of the reality of capital punishment. We have a habit of pushing unpleasant things out of our awareness. Albert Camus, speaking of this tendency, said: "The death penalty is to the body politic what cancer is to the individual body, but perhaps the single difference is that no one has ever spoken of the necessity of cancer."
Let us move to a more enlightened age where we no longer resort to State violence as an instrument of revenge. Let me end with the words of Victor Hugo who said:
In the early ages, the social edifice rested on three columns – Superstition, Tyranny, Cruelty. A long time ago, a voice exclaimed "Superstition has departed!" Lately another voice has cried "Tyranny has departed!" It is now full time that a third voice shall be raised to say "The Executioner has departed!"