I was interested to hear Deputy O'Leary state that this Bill is being brought in to deal with a few hundred squatters in Dublin and that this should be done. However, in an earlier part of his speech he defended the previous Minister for Justice who encouraged a woman to take over a house to which she was not entitled. Deputy O'Leary saw nothing wrong with this action and this is a typical example of a person falling into his own trap. Fianna Fáil have berated Fine Gael and Labour in the past week and stated that our amendment proposed to introduce selective justice. Deputy O'Leary has defended Deputy Moran's action but he has stated that anyone who encourages a person in Dublin to squat is wrong and that this Bill is necessary to deal with such people.
The amendment, which I support, deals with section 4 (1). This subsection states:
A person who encourages or advocates the commission of an offence under section 2 or 3 of this Act shall be guilty of an offence.
Section 2 defines the offence of forcible entry and section 3 deals with those people who intend remaining in occupation.
The amendment in the names of Deputies Cooney and Fitzpatrick seeks:
after "who" to insert "verbally (otherwise than on radio or television)".
Many of the Fianna Fáil speakers whom I have heard in the past days threw down the challenge that there was no mention of the Press or radio or television in this section. It is because they are not specifically mentioned and, therefore, not specifically protected that this amendment is introduced. It is because of that we hope to carry this amendment. I suppose hoping to carry it is really wishful thinking. Obviously, we have very little chance of carrying it so long as the 74 or 75 Fianna Fáil Deputies are prepared to vote against it.
There has been a good deal of talk about Fine Gael and Labour wasting time by their support of this amendment, thereby depriving Deputies and staff of their holidays. Deputy O'Connell said this morning that his motive is that he hopes to persuade some members of the Fianna Fáil Party, who will, in turn, persuade the Taoiseach that this is what he termed "oppressive legislation" and that the Minister will be advised to accept the amendment. I have no such hope. I see no possibility at all of persuading any member of the Fianna Fáil back benchers that this legislation is unnecessary or that this section should be amended.
We have also been accused of currying favour with the Press by our defence of this amendment and our objection to section 4. I do not agree that currying favour was the intention but, if it were the intention, then that was done two months ago when the Bill was debated on Second Stage. What I hope to do now is to bring to the attention of the public and to the more enlightened members of the Fianna Fáil Party—there are many thousands of them throughout the country—that this Bill, if passed, could in the long term be detrimental to the interests of the Fianna Fáil Party and certainly detrimental to the interests of the country. I hope that Fianna Fáil Deputies, seeing us standing up here and taking up the time of the House for so long opposing this Bill, will take the trouble of really looking into it to see what the long-term effects could be and how dangerous they could be and, having done that, I hope they will form a pressure group which will succeed in prevailing on the Minister to either drop the section or accept the amendment.
Deputy Tunney said yesterday that he thought this was the most important matter we had to deal with in the past 12 months and he was encouraged in that view by Deputy Cunningham, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Local Government. I regard Deputy Tunney as one of the better members of the Fianna Fáil Party and I really wondered at the time could he possibly believe what he was saying. During the past 15 months this country has been going through a very traumatic experience. The economy is in a dangerous condition. Houses are in short supply all over the country. EEC membership is staring us in the face. According to Deputy Tunney last night, all these things are less important than dealing with a handful of people. Outside of the city of Dublin I do not think there is any large-scale forcible entry. The Minister said that forcible entry and occupation was widespread throughout the country in the past two or three years. There is no widespread forcible entry and there is, therefore, no necessity for this Bill.
Forcible entry is largely confined to the city of Dublin. It may be of some concern in Deputy Tunney's constituency, but there is no large-scale incidence of forcible entry anywhere in the country. One or two people may from time to time have taken possession of premises, but the incidents were isolated. They were by no means widespread. One woman told me in the past month that she had been advised to occupy a vacant corporation house. I suppose the situation in Cork is similar to the situation in other areas. There are so many applicants for houses one might as well throw the applications up in the air and the first one down would be as much entitled to a house as any of the other 19 or 20 people.
This woman was advised, as I say, to occupy this vacant house. I told her she would do herself harm from the point of view of her place on the housing list and she would not be housed as quickly as she would otherwise be had she remained in her place in the queue. She went to the tenants' organisation and I am very pleased to say they gave her exactly the same advice. I am also pleased to say she rejected the advice given her in the first instance to occupy the house. She will be housed within the next two months. While this Bill would have got her out had she taken forcible possession, it would not have got at the people who encouraged her to break the law. She refused to name them to me—I know who they are—and I do not think she would name them for anybody else. They would not be caught under this Bill.
The Minister also said that the words "encourage" and "advocate" have precisely the same meaning as "incite". He said that in reply to a point made by Deputy Fitzpatrick. There is already legislation to deal with people who incite others to commit a crime. I looked up the Concise Oxford Dictionary and I see that incite means to urge or stir up; encourage means to incite, help, advise a person to do something; advocate means, and this is the one the Minister would use, I believe, if he wanted to get at the Press, to plead for or to recommend. I do not know about legal definitions of these words. I understand there is a legal definition of incite but not of encourage or advocate. It seems to me that encourage and incite could have the same meaning, but advocate has a different meaning and could be used in a different way. Advocate means to plead for, defend or recommend. If a newspaper editor in an editorial defended somebody who had broken the law, or had forcibly entered a premises, even though the editor's motives were good, his very action would render him liable to prosecution under this Bill.
This is what concerns people on this side of the House, that the traditional freedom of the Press to criticise Government actions and legislation now seems to be threatened. Unfortunately, this is in character with the Party introducing this legislation; they have always had a tendency not to accept advice or criticism or, indeed, the wishes of the people. Very early in their history one of their leaders said that the people had no right to do wrong. When I hear Deputy O'Leary saying that we are a democratic society and we must have a free Press, I wonder how deep-rooted is their belief in democracy. I know that this section of the Bill, if passed, would help further to dilute what little democracy has rubbed off on them after 40 years in this House.
The reluctance with which they accept any form of criticism was shown a few years ago before I came here when one of the farming journals, Farmers' Journal, criticised the then Minister for Agriculture and Fisheries for—I think—the Marts Bill—I am not sure of that. He promptly withdrew advertising from that organ for two years; they may be still not carrying Government advertising in that journal because they had the temerity to disagree with something the Minister was doing. If this legislation were enacted, the Government could still advertise in the journal because they would have a far easier way of getting at the editor and contributors to the journal than by merely withdrawing advertising.
A little paper with which in my private life I have some connection, the RGDATA Review came out last week and criticised the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Finance, Deputy Lemass, in very strong language because he opened a premises for a stamp trading firm. For a number of years the RGDATA Review has been advocating legislation to abolish dealing in trading stamps. So far, they have failed and their criticism of Deputy Lemass was certainly not gentle. If this section of the Bill goes through, the journal could be wiped out immediately for criticising a member of the Government. This is the Papa Doc mentality of the Fianna Fáil Party. They have been accused of being fascists, perhaps, fascists of the type we saw in the 30s in Europe who wanted repressive legislation to build up their own countries in a certain way until it became dictation. They are more to be admired than the Papa Doc type, who every time they hear criticism introduce legislation to knock on the head some unfortunate small group of people who do not agree with them.
We would all be most reasonable people if we got our own way always. We do not, and we cannot expect the whole country to agree with us all the time. Criticism is very good for us and the Minister would be very wise to accept this amendment because the Bill, as it stands, opens the gates for prosecution of Press and television personnel.
Deputy O'Connell and Deputy O'Leary referred earlier to Telefís Éireann and the fact that they were a monopoly and under Government control. I have a good deal of admiration for the journalists in Telefís Éireann because in the almost 10 years since it was founded they have shown some courage in their willingness to criticise members of the Government to which they owe their establishment. They might be less willing to do that if they thought this section would become law. The fact that Fianna Fáil Deputies said that there is no intention to get at the Press in this measure is not convincing because I think the Minister himself showed very clearly that he does so intend, or at least has the mentality of a man who would use the legislation in that way. I quote from Vol. 255 of the Official Report of the 13th July when Deputy O'Malley was replying to Deputy de Valera who had raised the matter of prosecution of certain journals that were carrying advertisements for contraceptives. The Minister for Justice pointed out that these journals were published in England and they could not be prosecuted. He then went on and said:
I have a recollection of reading in recent months, in all the Dublin newspapers, to a greater or lesser extent, numerous articles on the topic which is the subject of our discussion this evening. In particular, I recall quite a considerable number of articles by a lady who was, I understand, the woman editor of that particular newspaper—unfortunately, I believe she has left that employment now. On behalf of a recently formed organisation she consistently and almost daily appeared, to me at any rate, to advocate certain things which might or might not come within the ambit of section 16 (1). As a result of my attention having been drawn so eloquently and so forcibly to the very strict provisions of this section this evening, I consider the gardaí presumably will have to go through the files of a number of newspapers to see, not whether the advertising columns might potentially offend section 16, but whether the editorial matter might also be in breach of the section.
That, to my mind, was a clear threat to the proprietors, the editor and journalists of the Irish Press, that they should either behave themselves or pay the price in the courts for continuing to criticise Deputy O'Malley in his handling of the Censorship Act. I have no doubt that if this amendment is not accepted, the same threats will become realities very shortly afterwards.
I cannot understand the desire of the Minister to get this measure through before the House adjourns. He will have to face exactly the same battle in the Seanad as he is facing here and he will be lucky to get out of the Seanad by Christmas, never mind by the middle of October. He would be well advised to accept the amendment and the Fianna Fáil Party would be collectively wise—I am speaking of the members outside the House as well as inside it—if they went to the Minister and persuaded him to withdraw the Bill until the autumn which would leave him more opportunity to consider it in the calmer atmosphere of the summer holidays. If, by chance, this Bill goes through, I believe that some paper will immediately take the opportunity of testing it in the courts to find out whether it is unconstitutional or not. If it goes through here before the summer recess—there are only another two days left in the summer—and if it becomes law, I believe that before Christmas it will be tested in the Supreme Court to see if it is constitutional. I have no doubt the finding will be that it is unconstitutional. Therefore, I would recommend that the Minister should accept the amendment and exempt from prosecutions under sections 2 and 3 of the Bill offences committed verbally other than on radio or television.
