I shall not make any reference to the characteristic remarks of Deputy Lenehan except to say that if he thinks Deputies on the Labour benches had designs on his extensive interests in the licensed trade he would be guilty of an even greater degree of stupidity than is usually ascribed to him.
The nub of this Bill concerns the use of force. Section 1 says: "Forcibly means using or threatening to use force in relation to person or property, and for this purpose participation in action or conduct with others in numbers or circumstances calculated to prevent by intimidation the exercise by any person of his rights in relation to any property..." This would constitute a threat to use force.
If I may be philosophical for a moment the two concepts in that opening statement are that of force and that of right. What precisely is force? This is supposed to be a free and democratic society but I should have thought that the political system which separated husband and wife would be held to be guilty of an act of force. I should have thought that a political system which condemned over one million of our people to leave the country because they had no alternative over the last 40 years or so was a system resting on force rather than on right. I should have thought that a system which compelled people to live marginally above, and in some cases, substantially below the bread line was a system of force. It behoves this system very ill that it should rise in its dignity here, in the person of the Minister for Justice, and bring forward the entire spectacle of the forcible working of the law to prevent the physical expression of a particular form of poverty, to wit, squatting.
Very often it is stated, particularly at election times, that ours is a free society in which force does not occur and a comparison is made with communistic societies where force allegedly does occur. I remember listening some years ago to a leading politician, who for many years was one of the most prominent statesmen in this House, delivering a most moving peroration about circumstances in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. He was quoting an ex-prisoner of a concentration camp. He said—I speak from memory—she had declared that of all the deprivations she felt in Russia one stood out above the rest, not the deprivation of movement, political expression, party politics or the deprivation attendant on censorship, not all these forcible actions, but the deprivation, as she put it, of the right to cry alone.
I wonder in this free society of ours how many of the people who live in the overcrowded conditions, to which so many speakers have referred, possess that most fundamental right—to cry alone. Many of my constituents certainly do not possess it. Many of my constituents, young couples occupying the parlour room of two-bedroomed houses in Cabra have to wait until the television set is turned off before they can go to bed together, if the House will permit so precise a crudity. Do they possess the right to cry alone? I do not think so. Therefore, my contention at the outset is that these people are victims—whether they are organised by professional agitators or not, is, at this point irrelevant—of a society which rests upon force and deprivation. In response to this deprivation some of them go outside the law.
Let us consider the circumstances under which people may be provoked to go outside the law. It is as dangerous for themselves as for the society which they challenge. It is not something which anyone of us does lightly. Of course, for us who are in comfort to go outside the law is to drink after hours or park next to a double yellow line. If you are homeless and destitute, and, perhaps, with one or two children, it is much more terrifying to go outside the law. Is it then ever permissible to go outside the law? It was permissible in this country one time to go outside the law. There was a rule of law which was enshrined in many Acts passed on by successive English Parliaments some of which, as Deputy O'Connell pointed out, still weigh upon our under-privileged people. Yet, even though that law existed there were people in 1916 and later who felt that it was within the bounds of moral justification to exceed that law and to take the consequences—not, as I say, an easy decision.
I am not being so dramatic as to suggest that the plight of the homeless family in Dublin is an exact parallel with the plight of an exploited nation in 1916, but it is an approximate parallel and it brings out the point I want to make. One of the oldest points in the whole history of the development of free politics, one of the oldest points in the history of the development of the medieval Catholic ideas to which so many of us are supposed to subscribe is that the law should have behind it not merely the force of the State but also something of value, something which can be recognised to be true and be accepted. Where the law does not possess such value countless generations of men—men in many cases sanctified now by history—have urged that the law can then be broken. Let us then examine our consciences upon the exercise in which we are engaged, the bringing down of the sledgehammer of this Bill to try to destroy what is an outcrop of an unjust and, for that reason, forcible system. Deputy Gallagher said, and I quote:
To say that a person without a home is legally entitled to steal possession of a home and that he is not guilty and is not amenable is like saying that a hungry man can walk into a shop any day of the week and steal because he is hungry.
My colleague, Deputy Noel Browne, who is very often right, pointed out that this precise principle that the hungry man can steal is enshrined in the teachings of Saint Thomas Aquinas, who is still regarded as the dominant doctor of the Catholic Church. It is quite clear that however closely Deputy Gallagher may have studied the planning Act he has not studied the Summa Theologica.
This Bill seems, as so many other Bills brought before the House seem to me, to be an attempt to provide a legal remedy for an effect without examining its cause. In this way it seems to me essentially Victorian—let us outlaw vice, let us outlaw crime, but let us not seek its causes. One after another these repressive Bills come before the House. Even during my brief career here I have seen this Bill, the re-introduction of the second Part of the Offences against the State Act and now the promise of the re-introduction in some form of a Criminal Justice Bill. Would it not be better to look to the root causes which bring about these situations? The unnecessary force of this Bill is tantamount in moral terms to hanging a man for stealing sheep instead of inquiring why he is hungry in the first place. I am afraid that an awful lot of legislation emanating from this Government bears the mark of a hasty and oppressive determination to remedy the consequences of a system without seeking in any way to change or improve it.
We have heard much, not surprisingly, and specifically from the Minister and from Deputy Gallagher, about the respective rights of public and private ownership. It is not necessary to be a Marxist revolutionary socialist to believe that there are many circumstances in which the right of private ownership must give way to the rights of public ownership. On this point the Constitution has been quoted correctly several times and may I quote a section which I think has not been quoted before, a section about the directive principles of social policy? Article 45, paragraph 2 states:
The State shall, in particular, direct its policy towards securing
(i) That the citizens (all of whom, men and women equally, have the right to an adequate means of livelihood) may through their occupations find the means of making reasonable provision for their domestic needs.
(ii) That the ownership and control of the material resources of the community may be so distributed among private individuals and the various classes as best to subserve the common good.
The common good may not be thought much of here but, of course, these directive principles of social policy were wisely made the only portions of the Constitution which were not enforcible in law. If they were, very few of us would be sitting in these benches today. I could cite the democratic programme in support of the view that this individual property which this Bill cherishes so much may at times be set aside by the needs of the people, needs such as we see today. Let me, above all, quote Patrick Pearse in his last great writing "The Sovereign People":
The right to the control of the material resources of a nation does not reside in any individual or in any class of individuals it resides in the whole people. It is for the nation to determine to what extent private property may be held by its members, and in what items of the nation's material resources private property shall be allowed.
I wonder what Deputy Gallagher would make of that in the party of republicanism. Again:
A nation may, for instance, determine as the free Irish nation determined and enforced for many centuries, that private ownership shall not exist in land, that the whole of a nation's soil is the public property of the nation.
Pearse concludes that passage by saying:
I do not disallow the right to private property but I insist that all property is held subject to the national sanction.
Let us compare that stirring language, language of the supreme founder more than anyone else of this State, with the language of the Bill. It says:
"owner", in relation to land, includes the lawful occupier, every person lawfully entitled to the immediate use and enjoyment of unoccupied land...
It goes on:
The doing of an act, which, if done by the owner of an incorporeal hereditament, would be an exercise of a right that is the subject of or attached to the hereditament shall, for the purposes of this Act, be deemed, in relation to the hereditament, to constitute an entry and an occupation of land.
I know that these are legal figments and do not mean precisely what they are set out to be but I wonder what Pearse, the quondam lawyer who abandoned the practice of law because he found that kind of terminology uncongenial, would make of this great defence of private property. To turn specifically to squatting. I know of no family, and I have known many families of squatters, who have entered into the act of squatting lightly. It is a desperate remedy for a desperate tragedy. If any Deputy thinks that an impoverished family lightly or cheerfully takes the bits and pieces of furniture it has accumulated over the early years of marriage, breaks into a house and sets the pots and pans and the few little things that it owns around that house—that decaying tenement in many cases, or that mausoleum about to be offered up as an image of the new society in which we live—just as one of us would move from Ballsbridge to Foxrock or vice versa—he knows little about life. I make little defence here of squatting in corporation houses. I think given the strictures imposed upon the corporation system of allocation the corporation on the whole do the best job they can. I do not defend the system of allocation but within it the corporation do the best job they can. In my opinion a prospective tenant who jumps the queue is acting indefensibly even though he is driven by an intense urgent need. On the other hand, I have considerable sympathy for those people who see property lying idle while speculators buy up the rest of the terrace. I have sympathy for those homeless people who see this happening and who, consequently, squat; we should recognise their plight and not seek to persecute them for it.
This is a Bill that touches particularly on the experience of urban Deputies—I am not saying exclusively, but it affects them to a considerable extent. Many cases have come to my attention in my brief career as a Deputy which fully bear out the horrific picture of our mid-Victorian system of house allocation painted by Deputy O'Connell last night. I am sick and tired and depressed, more than anything else in my career as a Deputy, by the housing situation. People come to me night after night looking for houses and all I can say to them is: "There is no hope for you. You have only got one child, you will not be considered by the corporation." Sometimes I tell them: "You have only two children. You are extremely unlikely to be considered by the corporation." There are so many of these cases that it is pointless to go into them at length.
I will give one example. A two-bedroomed house at Cabra is occupied by a husband and wife, two children, the wife's three brothers and the wife's mother. They are spread out in the house in the following way: the young woman, the two children, her mother and her brother of 14 are in one room and her two brothers, aged 21 and 28 years, are in the back room. The husband left ultimately because he could not stand it any longer. The response I got to a request to rehouse this family was as follows:
Dear Sir,
With reference to your letter of 14th January, 1971, regarding the application for housing accommodation for Mr. X., I desire to inform you that he is registered as a family of four persons living in overcrowded conditions. His name is on the housing list for a flat in any area and he will be notified when his turn is reached.
I have to take this letter to him and tell him I am sorry but I do not make the rules. Could anyone blame that husband and wife and their two children if they squat? How can we blame them and put down their motivation for squatting to the Dublin Housing Action Committee, Sinn Féin, the Labour Party, communism, Maoism or anything else? Put it down to naked hunger, squalor and exploitation and place it on your consciences where it belongs.
I have here another case of a family in my area. It is a family with two children and they are expecting a third child. They occupy one room. In another bedroom the wife's two sisters, aged 15 and 21 years, live and in the third are her mother, father and 24 year old brother. I wonder if those people have the right to cry alone which allegedly is denied to people in Soviet Russia about which we hear so much. I do not blame these people if they squat and, with Deputy O'Connell, I stand with them, rather than against them. I consider that the law and the process of parliamentary legislation could better be promoted towards ameliorating their appalling lot rather than providing the end punishments, comparable to the transportation of 150 years ago, for their crime of wanting a house in which to live.
In this debate much has been made, and correctly so, of the Constitution and more particularly of those articles in the Constitution which provide for the primacy of the family. This is something we hear very much about in this country and in particular is often thrown at members of these benches. At election times we are barracked at every dyke and ditch throughout the country about our alleged addiction to contraception, abortion, divorce, and so on. This alleged addiction is supposed to fly in the teeth of the pristine virtues of the Irish Catholic people which rest so secure in the hands of our present Government. There is much hypocrisy in this country but I do not think there has been a more blinding piece of hypocrisy than our alleged view of marriage and the family.
Article 41.3 states:
1º The State pledges itself to guard with special care the institution of Marriage, on which the family is founded, and to protect it against attack.
2º No law shall be enacted providing for the grant of a dissolution of marriage.
Article 41.1.1º recognises the family as the natural primary and fundamental unit group of society. No law should be enacted to provide for the dissolution of a marriage or the disruption of a family but it is obvious that a system is permitted to do this. I have many cases of families where the husbands and wives are separated because they cannot find accommodation and the corporation, with their present priorities, cannot entertain applications for families with one or two children.
I have a case here of a family with one child who live in one room. The mother and father and their five children, of mixed sexes aged from 21 to 14 years, live in the other room. In addition to all this the young child suffers from hydrocephalus. The reply received to their application for accommodation is that Mr. X is listed as a family of four persons and his application will be duly considered when accommodation becomes available any place on the north side. It is not surprising that the husband has left that house.
I have another case which is supported by a letter from the parish priest of the Church of the Precious Blood in Cabra. The husband and wife are separated because of lack of accommodation. The wife lives with her one child with her parents and the husband lives with his parents. The history of understandable bickering and fighting culminated in the departure——
