It is a quotation from The Irish Times. This is the Bill which we not merely administer when in Government but which we seek to extend to the North. It is, if I may be allowed a mild diversion from the subject, on all fours with the Forcible Entry and Occupation Bill. I sat on the Opposition side of the House and listened with amazed adulation to the filibustering speech of the present Minister for Posts and Telegraphs against the Forcible Entry Bill. It, too, is not merely on the Statute Book but has been invoked within the last 24 hours. Perhaps this reaction of mine to the idea that one should think one thing in Opposition and another in Government is an example of my innocence and my incapacity to take any active part in public life or in politics. Perhaps the most honourable and decent thing for me to do would be to quit public life tonight as one member of what is now the Opposition once did. I am eternally turned back to the quotation from Alexander Pope and again I speak from memory:
To place and power all public spirit tends.
In place and power all public spirit ends.
This appears to be our attitude towards measures which, from those Opposition benches, we filibustered to a point where the closure had to be applied to allow them to go through. I begin to wonder what company I am keeping.
I am, through a succession of accidents, an educated man, for what that is worth, educated in the academic sense, probably worth absolutely nothing. I was brought up to believe that law should possess both value and validity. I remember Sir Ernest Barker defining this in one of his greatest books. Validity can be given to any law by an assembly like this but does it possess value? In particular in a country which is predominantly Roman Catholic and dominated by the natural law concept of value does it possess value? If we pass a law here that all redheaded men ought to be automatically executed, does that make that law good law at once, a law to be administered by the courts? I do not think so. The German judges did not take the message very well. Eichmann pleaded that the administration of law as laid down by the State was his sole purpose and function. The same argument was used in that remarkable film "Judgment at Nuremberg". This did not stop the outraged conscience of Western Europe from imprisoning the judges who administered laws which, in the view of civilised society, fell outside the purview of the normal human conscience. The same applies here. I think I was the only TD with the guts to attend the trials of Ruairí Ó Brádaigh and Daithí Ó Conaill. The spectacle of people being sentenced to, in one case, six months imprisonment and, in the other case, 12 months, simply on the word of a senior policeman, reduced me to a state bordering on sickness. Surely there is a time when a judge simply says: "I will not administer this law because it is bad law". In my view, this Bill is bad law.
As I, at 40 years of age and a professor of political science, who has read some books, look at this Bill, I feel, perhaps, that I should burn every book I have read about justice and about the principle of being innocent before being proved guilty, forget about the whole lot, because this State seems to have defined a form of justice special to itself. I also think this Bill is extremely regrettable because it has been shown in every country of the civilised world that repressive legislation is counterproductive, that it only makes martyrs, and that making martyrs only breeds generations of more people prepared to indulge in violence.
I had the pleasure the other day at the European Parliament of talking to a very close friend of mine, a Conservative MP, Hugh Dykes, who sits for Harrow, who said that in no circumstances could he countenance the bringing back of the death penalty. I thought this was a brave and courageous statement for an Englishman to make at a moment in time when the atmosphere between our two countries is so tense. No one knows this better than I do because no one in this House catches more aeroplanes that go through Heathrow than I do. Furthermore, in furtherance of this Bill we are being asked to take cognisance of the use of the bombs which have gone off at Dublin Airport. That trick was tried before and it worked. It did not work where the Labour Party was concerned. I, for one, said straight out that I did not believe that the Provisional IRA were responsible for the use of the bombs in O'Connell Street on that famous day and I took the dangerous risk of ringing a senior contact I had in the Provisional IRA from this very House who gave me his word of honour that the bombs were not Provisional IRA bombs. Nor do I believe that the bombs planted at Dublin Airport were Provisional IRA bombs. Yet, to say this is to identify oneself with violence. This is the infuriating thing to me.
To attack a Bill like this because it is intrinsically, to me, a horrendous, appalling Bill, is inevitably twisted into a defence of violence. I am sure, if the Government have not exhausted their store of speakers, they will rise one after another after me accusing me of associating myself with men of violence. Nothing could be further from the truth. We have to face the fact that this State was born in violence, that the tradition of violence runs right through it and runs right through its history books and runs right through its newspaper articles until very recently and I am not prepared to stand here and see history rewritten by some gentleman on the front bench who would have us believe that Redmond and Dillon would have attained all they wished if only Pearse and Connolly had not got in the way —and de Valera—I give you that.
Labour was founded by a gunman who paid the ultimate penalty for his use of a revolver. Fine Gael was founded by perhaps the most sophisticated assassin of his generation. I am not saying that in criticism of him. He is possibly the greatest hero in my entire life. A picture of him hangs on my wall at home—a very rare picture— but he was an assassin.
We cannot simply condemn the Price sisters, the rest, to eternal punishment because they have inherited a tradition which built us and I am not afraid to say that even though I know I am taking my life in my hands politically in saying it. This is the tradition we were born out of and the Minister for Justice would not be sitting where he is sitting at this moment if Pearse had not stood aside and Tom Clarke had shot down the door of the General Post Office in 1916. Anyone who says anything else about Irish history I will take on in free historical debate, because I am an historian, and one of some repute.
Of the Bill itself, as I have said, I detest it, I loathe it, I loathe the manner in which it is spread out to include acts which to my non-legal mind do not seem relevant. I hope it will be declared unconstitutional. If there is any fund got up to try to make it unconstitutional I shall be the first to contribute to said fund. That does not make me a man of violence. it just makes me a realist. Lloyd George said he would never sit down with murderers. About two years later he was sitting down with Collins whom he called the greatest murderer in the British Isles.
I want to give some of the background to this Bill and I am leading up, like a good actor—and I hope the sneer is evident in that remark—to what I finally want to say. This Bill was never discussed by the Labour Party. A group of bewildered Senators was summoned by telegram from every art and part of Ireland to introduce the Bill in the Seanad after an unseemly squabble in the Dáil over the possibility of introducing it here. The analogy was made, with somewhat unfortunate reality, by the Parliamentary Secretary to the Taoiseach of the Preservation of Wild Life Bill which had similarly been introduced in the Seanad. This was deemed a sufficient analogy to introduce this thing—this thing—which semi-recognises the Northern RUC and semi-recognises their methods.
As a result of the meeting of those Senators a meeting was called by Deputy Desmond to discuss the Criminal Law (Jurisdiction) Bill. No such meeting was ever held. We were presented with a resolution in the name of the Minister for Local Government saying: "If you do not vote for the Bill the Whip is automatically removed from you."
Years ago—1964, I think it was— when I was a very young academic, I wrote an article in Studies called “Ireland: The End of An Era”, in which I said that apparently Ireland was governed on the principle of what the English would call Buggins's turn. As C.P. Snow would say, every man is entitled to quote his own clichés, and so it appears to be. The clarion call of the Coalition to the nation seems to be: “We stink but they stink more than we stink or they have been stinking longer than we have been. So, let us stink a little bit longer and then we will get our pensions and you can get them back again and have their stink all over again.” If that is democracy I do not know what I became a Professor of Political Science for. That appears to be the clarion call we are sending out to the young people of Ireland.
I am not a lawyer. I do not fully understand this Bill. Thank God, I am not a lawyer. I object to the principle that citizens of the Republic are delivered into the custody of the Royal Ulster Constabulary. I do not understand if evidence will be taken from informers. I do not understand if they will be identified. I do not understand if they can claim privilege. I do not understand if they can be interrogated. Certainly following upon Deputy O'Connell here, if by any tests like that of the Compton Report, we are to judge the techniques of the Royal Ulster Constabulary then to deliver citizens of the Republic, no matter how heinous their crimes—and I regard the placing of bombs in public places as a heinous crime, a heinous and indefensible crime—at the same time from what little I know of the Royal Ulster Constabulary I would not wish that any citizen of my country should be delivered to their tender mercies.
I am almost finished. I have gone on longer than usual. Finally, this Bill seems to me to copperfasten the 1972 amendment to the Offences Against the State Act into the legal system by the use of the commissioner. I object to this. I do not know what role this commissioner plays. One commissioner is a personal friend of mine, a man I admire greatly, and I wonder what role he is expected to play in this regard.
As I say, I have left the last point to the end, like a good actor. Again, I hope the sneer against myself is relevant. I intend to vote for this Bill. Hugh Gaitskell said on a different occasion on a different issue that he would stay in the Labour Party to fight, fight and fight again to change its views on a certain issue. There is nothing that would please certain people in the Labour Party more than that I should ride off into the sunset on a white horse like John Wayne, only slightly shorter and slightly fatter, so that they could get on with the business of manipulating the nation. No, I am made of sterner stuff than that.
My friends in Fianna Fáil have listened to me with a great deal more attention than the Coalition Members. There are only three Deputies, including the Minister, on the Government benches but Fianna Fáil Deputies have paid me the courtesy of listening to me with attention. I admire the unity of the Fianna Fáil Party. I admire the way it has never broken its ranks really definitively since it was founded in 1926. I admire its solidity. I have been told from time to time since 1945 that it was about to disintegrate. I have never believed that to be so, and I do not believe it to be so now.
I would remind Members of the Fianna Fáil Party that there was an occasion when a Deputy, whom I shall not name, went through the lobbies to vote confidence in a Government, a Member of whom he had been very personally abusive about. That night there was a lot of invective and unpleasantness about that Member and about the Member of the Government. It did not come from me. In the same way, I am wedded to the Labour Party. I believe it to be the repository of socialism in this country. I regret the Redmondite drift which is developing in it as evidenced by this Bill.
It was Martin Corry of the Fianna Fáil Party who once said to me when I was a very young man that you can say what you like but what you do with your feet is the important thing and "my feet", he said, "will always go into the Fianna Fáil lobby". In the same way I feel bound in all honesty to vote for a Bill which I detest and despise and I hope it is found unconstitutional. There will be no more reluctant pair of feet going up those steps than mine. I crave your indulgence in that I could have invented a diplomatic illness or a visit to Strasbourg and save myself the agony of making this speech today, and declaring my position outright.
