It is with a great deal of anger and not a little regret that I raise this matter at this time because, if my information is correct, Paul Kane is on his way at this moment towards the cursed Border and has been for the past half hour. That Border is the curse of our people and country.
In order that his way be smoothed — something like the projections in the plan — we have 200 Garda backed up by the Army and all south bound roads blocked off, with an Irish Army helicopter in conjunction with two RUC or British Army helicopters in surveillance. Paul Anthony Kane is for the high jump if he has not already crossed the line.
I want to say seriously to the Minister, to the Government and every Member of this House that we should be ashamed to call ourselves an Irish Parliament. I say that with all due respect to the fact that we have all been elected from the Twenty-Six Counties. It makes me feel ridiculous, particularly when I am abroad, to meet people who ask the unanswerable question as to how our parliamentarians and Government or leading Opposition spokesmen are now on the bandwagon condemning the lack of justice in British courts campaigning for the release of the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four and looking for a full pardon for the Maguires on the basis that all these people did not get a fair trial under the British jurisdiction when at the same time that Government are sending more of our citizens to be tried by those courts. It is hypocrisy of the highest order.
However, I would go further. I will try not to bring in what I know of the Minister and the people who went before him. but it comes to mind that I am talking to a Minister who should know so much better, who rather than do what he has done now would cease to be a Minister.
In sending this man across the Border we are dealing with extraordinary circumstances. When people talk about civilised countries or indeed so called noncivilised or under-developed countries — I never quite know whether they are talking about the unknown world or this God damned one we are living in. Be what it may, Paul Kane was sent to Longkesh with ten or 12 more of his colleagues on the evidence of a supergrass. During his internment, he found it possible to escape. Subsequent to his escape the said evidence of the supergrass was found to be so flawed that even those extreme people who sent him behind bars decided that the evidence could not satisfy their biased outlook and they released those who were still imprisoned — in other words, they should never have been there. In any man's language, without parsing and analysing it in a legalistic sense, the man was never in legal custody but was held unlawfully. He escaped from it, but he is now being sent back, because of this and the 15 other trumped up charges — which we know they are so adept at when they are trying to get somebody. However, the basic fact is that he was jailed in Longkesh on spurious evidence, escaped from it before his pals were released and now he is being sent back on the basic charge that he escaped from lawful custody, when we know that it was unlawful and the very release of the people who were imprisoned with him at the same time is evidence that he or they should never have been there. He is now going to face a series of charges, some related to his escape from custody which was never lawful.
He is one of our citizens, but we tend to forget that in this House. We are so partition-minded that we tend to ask whether he is from the South or the North. He is from Ireland, an Irish citizen, and our Constitution lays down — and rightly so — that all the children of the nation should be treated equally. He is of this nation and we are sending him to a place where he cannot expect to get a fair trial due to facts we already know about the Birmingham Six, the Guilford Four and all the other cases, the six shootings in Armagh, the butchery in Gibraltar and Bloody Sunday. They are the same people, regardless of the Anglo-Irish Agreement and the inter-Governmental conference. They are no different from what they were then, and they prove this every day, but for the fact of the massive propaganda machine which they are more adept at using than any other people in the world because they are at it longer and have had more reason to cover up their tracks. We do not see the wood for the trees, do not see what they are doing. Instead of looking for subversives under our respective beds, we should be looking in the beds to see who is in them with us and to see what influence MI5 and the CIA wield in the various political parties, in this Parliament, the present Government, or in the country.
We are being led by the nose by these people and their propaganda and their obsession about security. The only security they are concerned about is to continue the occupation of this country. This case is the most outrageous of all because we are sending this man back to be charged with escaping from lawful custody. It was unlawful and illegal custody. Then they added 15 other charges so that at least one would stick.
Do you think Kane will get a fair hearing when he gets back? Do you think there is not a real danger of him losing his life? Does the House not realise that it is not protecting its citizens and that we are contravening the spirit of our Constitution? We are spitting on the people who gave their lives that we might be in this little Parliament today in some sort of freedom which we are now throwing away by pandering to our occupiers. The propaganda is so massive — it is brainwashing — that the public should be clawing this place apart, but they are quiescent, afraid and intimidated. It is happening day in and day out and it is much more subtle than in a physical sense.
If the pictures of people not as prominent as the Members of this House were recorded at a protest rally against extradition or an anti-hunger strike, members of their families would not get a job in a State or semi-State organisation or associated bodies and of course the security forces are taboo as far as any of the family is concerned. Even if they are on a peaceful protest, they will not be considered for such jobs. Then we talk about equality and treating the children of the nation equally. We will go down in history as the most craven generation that ever purported to represent their country in any age anywhere.
We are collaborators of the first order with people who should be tried for war crimes. We cannot lean backwards far enough — our vertebrae does not allow it — but if we could we would tie ourselves in knots to kowtow to Mrs. Thatcher who represents the establishment in Great Britain. In the greater horizons of the European Community we are seen as law abiding, peace keeping, peace loving and security conscious whereas we are craven, inferiority ridden rats. That is what we are, what we are displaying ourselves to be and what history will record about us. My God, I do not know what has happened and I cannot credit that the Members of this House, no matter which side they are on or what party politics they adhere to, can sit quietly while this goes on. I am not talking about the few Deputies who are here, I am talking about all those who are not here. They did not protest when a young man such as Kane, a citizen of this country, was sent over to be reincarcerated where he never should have been in the first instance.
We are spitting on the escapes of the past. If we had had the same outlook in those days as we are now displaying what would we have done with de Valera when he escaped? Lawful custody, how are you? How would we have treated the patriots down the years who made their escape? Judging by the tone, attitude and climate pervading the country, and this House in particular, we would be sending them back to wherever they came from to finish their sentences or to have their sentences terminated by having their heads cut off, hanging or shooting them.
I implore the House, the Minister and the Government to rethink the entire situation in which they have found themselves by devices of propaganda to look at the past and try to forecast the future. They must realise that we are not representative of the people who went before us or doing a fair deal for the people who come after us. We are selling out like we never sold out before. We have had traitors in the past, people who individually sold us out. They are recorded in song and story which, in our brainwashed days, we do not allow to be played on the airwaves of our national station because they might contaminate the present generation by knowing what happened in the past. Maybe it is because we are afraid that comparisons would be made with those traitorous acts of individuals in the past.
As a Government, as a parliament, there is no parallel in history in this or any other country for the way we are behaving at present in our abject grovelling to our occupier. We are prepared to pay any price by exporting those who are sought by the Crown although we know they will not get a fair trial and that they are where they are because they did not get a fair deal down the years. They are where they are because they are trying to change it and we are doing our damnedest to stop even the sympathy of our people being accorded to them. It is monstrous, appalling and mind-boggling in an Irish context and in an Irish Parliament that we perpetrate these sorts of deeds in the name of security, peace-keeping and peace in the future. However, we know full well that there is no possibility of peace even beginning to break out unless and until the occupier to whom we are now pandering decides she is going. If only we could have sent her out she would have been gone long ago.
The reality is we are not capable of doing it but at least let us try to bring to her mind that the Executive, the Sunningdale Agreement, the Anglo-Irish Agreement and the Irish Conference are only fiddling while the North burns. After all these things have been tried and failed, the only answer is to point out to our occupier that if she has any interest in peace in this land of ours — which many times I doubt — the way to do it is to declare her intention of leaving, to make it clear she means she is going and that she does not give us very long from the declaration until the date of departure. I have no doubt that if that were done, instead of a bloodbath there would be meaningful talks between the divided communities in the North and between North and South, which you will never see while we persist in allowing and helping the occupier to stay where she is. God help Kane and others like him whom we may, through our belief of justice, send back now and in the future.
