The particular section we are dealing with opens with words which include the following: "A person who encourages or advocates the commission of an offence" under this particular Bill. Offences under this Bill include in certain circumstances the locking of a door, or the barring of a gate by someone occupying property of which he is not the owner. These two words have somewhat different meanings. Had they not they would not be used. Had the Minister been satisfied to try to get at people who advocate the commission of an offence he would have confined himself to that word. He has chosen, however, to use another and broader term capable of a very wide interpretation indeed.
It is not difficult to encourage people by word or by example and there are many ways in which one can do it. One can do it. for example, by means of a chicken. The chicken which the former Minister for Finance sent to the occupants of Hume Street at Christmas 18 months ago was most encouraging for them. I was there at the time. They were greatly cheered that the Minister should have thought so much of them as to send them this chicken. It gave them heart to continue their struggle. Perhaps his gesture may not have been in every respect genuine. I do not know but it certainly was not reflected in the actions of the Government for some months later. It was not until in fact the Government changed and somebody succeeded to his post that sympathy to the students concerned was shown in a more practical way for which they and others associated with them have since been duly grateful. Nevertheless, whatever his motive, the Minister sent a chicken and he gave encouragement.
Under this Bill that Minister should have been arraigned before a court and charged with encouraging these people to commit this offence. Moreover, it would be open to the Attorney General, should a malicious sense of humour prompt him to do so, to bring into court also the other members of the Government and have them charged, although of course it would be open to the court to hold that the chicken incident was one entirely prompted by the personal goodwill of the Minister for Finance and it would be unfair to send to jail or otherwise nine other members of the Government, not capable of such goodwill. I suppose in such circumstances they might have been let off with a caution, let off completely, exonerated or pardoned, whatever the appropriate action is.
Let us be clear what this Bill means. By adding in the word "encouragement", the Minister is deliberately widening it to include various classes of persons, saying or doing various things which in themselves by any conceivable moral standards are innocent things. Let us consider the theologian who writes a textbook on moral theology and who enunciates that well tried axiom of moral theology in the Roman Catholic Church, known apparently to everybody except Deputy James Gallagher, that is, that a man who is starving, whose family are starving, is morally entitled to take food where he may find it to the amount he needs to ensure that his family are not starving. It is true we have had an alternative philosophy enunciated here. We have had Deputy Gallagher on this Bill asking where would this thing stop if you are going to allow people to occupy property which does not belong to them when they need shelter, including some abandoned house; that next there will be people saying they are entitled to steal food because they are starving.
The Deputy apparently had not known, his upbringing was such perhaps that he did not know, this was the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church and has been so since its foundation. Of course, any theologian who advocates this, who writes this down in a textbook and who says that a person in that condition is morally entitled not alone to take a loaf of bread to feed his family but if he is without shelter and finds an abandoned dwelling he is entitled to enter therein —another speaker has given an example of that—I shall not repeat it —of some historic importance—is of course encouraging the commission of an offence under this Bill and he and all his associates and those responsible for his actions, the bishops of the church concerned, must be arraigned before the court. No doubt the bishops could get off by pleading that the theology has been changed and that they no longer have this heretical belief, so unpalatable to the Fianna Fáil Government, and that the Catholic Church, in response to the demand of the Fianna Fáil Government, will change its mind. I doubt it very much but if they did I suppose they could get off and avoid going to jail leaving the theologian to carry the full burden himself. These are the absurdities to which this Bill leads us.
You have the position then of a newspaper, any newspaper, which in the event of a repetition of something like the affair of Hume Street says anything that encourages in any way the students, anything that suggests they are doing something valuable or useful, any phrase of that kind brings that newspaper editor into contempt and brings him into a position where he should be arraigned before the courts, fined and sent to jail. Anybody who writes a letter to the paper which can be construed as offering encouragement, which does not outrightly condemn these heinous activities of seeking to shelter the homeless or to preserve what evil men would destroy, is liable to be sent to jail under this Bill.
Any politician who is so unwise and so unwilling to accept the moral authority of the Fianna Fáil Government as to suggest that any action of this kind might in any circumstances be justified also goes to jail. A politician, to take a practical and immediate example, visits a squatter, as many of us have to do because of the situation in which so many people are squatting because of lack of housing, who tries to resolve their problems, get housing for them, get them out and get the space released for someone else, anyone who finds himself in that position and who offers any encouragement to that squatter, who does not immediately walk in the door and say: "Out you go, you have no right to be here," can find himself arraigned before the court. Anybody who shows any human kindness, who does not by word or deed immediately suggest that the squatter must get out but who accepts that he is there and that something must be done to find alternative accommodation and accepts that he will remain there until something is done or until he the TD can do something about it, is of course guilty of an offence under this Bill.
Of course, anybody who stood on the lorry at Hume Street would have been guilty of an offence if this Bill had been law then, not just myself but distinguished politicians. I see one here today, Deputy Dr. Cruise-O'Brien. I saw him offering the most illegal encouragement to these squatters up there, I am sorry to say. I saw Deputy Justin Keating there and I saw other Deputies of the Fine Gael Party in the crowd there. Their presence there, their demeanour, their laughter and applause on certain occasions when certain things were said, would have brought them within the scope of this Bill also. It is possible that some of them may have been sufficiently cautious to maintain a demeanour offering no encouragement but I am afraid most of them were prompted by the exhilaration of the occasion to show some kind of approval. Indeed the very fact of their presence there, the fact they came up there in the crowd and stood outside, even if they kept a grim face throughout, that itself offered encouragement to the students, as I know, because they said frequently what an encouragement it was to them that people of standing in public life were sufficiently interested and concerned to come along. All of these people would have gone to jail and the rest of their parties unless their parties repudiated them forthwith and said they should not have got involved, that they should not have smiled, applauded or said an encouraging word to those concerned. This is the scope of this Bill.
Do not let the Minister say that this is exaggeration. It would of course be an exaggeration to suggest that this Minister intends, when this Bill is law, to operate it in this way, that his first thought will be to get at the authors of books on moral theology. I am not suggesting that is in the Minister's mind and I am not suggesting that any of the other people whom I have suggested could suffer under this Bill will suffer, that this Minister intends to attack them, but laws should not be enacted which give to Governments, this and future Governments, powers of a kind which run far beyond what is necessary and which threaten the liberties of a whole range of people, whether they be theologians, or newspaper editors, or politicians, or students, or letter writers to the papers, or members of An Taisce, or members of the Dublin Civic Group, or members of the Dublin Housing Action Committee, unless they engage directly in some illegal activity.
Bills of that kind should not come before the House. When they come before the House they should be rejected. It is up to all of us who are free of the Fianna Fáil Party Whip to voice the feeling, which I know is shared by members of Fianna Fáil also, that this is a misguided Bill, a Bill we do not need, and a Bill that goes far beyond any conceivable requirement of the situation. The problem, such as it exists, of squatting in corporation property, and a real problem it is, was tackled by legislation last year. Personally I was unhappy with some aspects of that legislation but I could see the reason for it. In the case of corporation property the ownership of that property is clearcut and no issue of ownership arises. One can make a case for special legislation to deal with that. The case against this legislation here has been made more broadly on Second Reading and I shall not repeat it.
Whatever about the need for a measure to deal with corporation property, and even if one conceded, as I do not, that a Bill of the kind before us here was necessary with a view to dealing with people engaging in this particular activity, none of us could agree with this attempt to bring within the scope of the Bill everyone who by word or by deed offers encouragement to squatters, encouragement to people engaged in the kind of activity the students in Hume Street were engaged in, treating them as criminals and indicting them accordingly.
I wonder whether, even in the worse period of British rule, legislation as broad as this in scope was brought in. My memory of what historical knowledge I used to have of the Parnellite period does not enable me to quote the text of the Bills and the Acts that were brought in at the time to deal with the Land Leaguers, the cat and mouse provisions. I could not say whether, in fact, they went as far as this, but I am inclined to doubt it. The only precedent we have in Irish history for a Bill like this is the kind of legislation brought in at that time to deal with the Land Leaguers. I was forcibly struck with the thought of the continuity of Irish history when just over a year ago in Hume Street from that lorry I heard the voice of a man whose father was imprisoned because of his involvement at that time. He was professor Myles Dillon. John Dillon was one of the people sent to prison by the British Government because he encouraged—that may not have been the word used; I doubt if the British Government would have gone so far—or advocated measures of resistance to laws of property at that time which operated against ordinary decent Irish people.
This Minister who has sought to emulate that example found his example there. For all I know he may even have found the words in the Bill there. As I say, I doubt if the British went that far. That is the precedent we have. This Bill is not designed to protect Dublin Corporation or other local authorities. That has been well, truly and completely done in the Bill passed here last July. The purpose of this Bill is solely to deal with private property, private property which is not, in fact, threatened by the kind of occupation the Minister has suggested graphically to us. There is not an epidemic of people entering somebody's house when he is away on holidays, taking it over, living there and forcing him to take a civil action to get them out. Such an event has certainly never occurred to my knowledge in the recent history of this country. I think I read the papers well enough to have come across such a court case if it occurred. We are not faced with such an epidemic. There is no situation at the moment in which private individuals are being deprived of their own domestic property by people seeking to take it over, put them out and live in it. That is not the problem.
There are, indeed, some demonstrations taking place justified by the appalling housing situation which this Government have created by their neglect in this area. There are other demonstrations from time to time which involve the temporary occupation of premises. They are not activities of a kind which would justify this Bill or this type of section in a Bill under which anybody who says that the people who organised the fish-in had a point because the rights of the landlord are dubious should be sent to prison for saying so. I do not know any Bill that has been brought before this House, not only in the period I have been a Member of the Oireachtas but within my memory going back to the Offences Against the State Act of 1939-40, which had this characteristic of being so broadly drafted as to bring within it potentially so many different groups of innocent people, people properly engaged in carrying out their duties, newspaper editors, letter writers to newspapers concerned about the housing situation and the squatting problem which the lack of housing has created, theologians, priests or pastors concerned to look after the spiritual interest of their flock and concerned to assert that basic Christian doctrine which I have already enunciated and which all accept other than the Fianna Fáil Party and in particular the Minister and Deputy James Gallagher.
I cannot accept that such a provision is needed or can be justified. The Minister must think twice about it. A Government in the condition which the present Government are in are bound by some law of nature to involve themselves in blunders and mistakes. We have seen three of them within a very short period of time. We had the extraordinary dole blunder and the inept attempt to cover up.
