Ruairi Quinn (Dublin South East, Labour)

I will not take the 15 minutes. Although this is not normally my territory, I have read the debate from last year and at the behest of Deputy Howlin, I am making a contribution on behalf of the Labour Party.

Why do we have this legislation and why is it so starkly described? It is useful for us to reflect on the fact that when this State, now only 85 years old, was first established in 1922, only two of the parties currently elected to this assembly actually recognised the legitimacy of the State. Labour and Fine Gael have that honour.

Although I do not have the precise dates, it seems it took Fianna Fáil more than four years to do so, and it did not enter this Chamber until 1927, doing so very reluctantly. As the leader of the party after Éamon de Valera said, Fianna Fáil was a slightly constitutional party. There was a big residual cultural reluctance to recognise the legitimacy of the State. Many on the periphery of Fianna Fáil in the 1930s did not recognise this legitimacy and thought Fianna Fáil, their ally, would indulge them. These people were put in jail by the party and in some cases, they were hanged.

I stand open to correction but I believe Sinn Féin only decided to enter the Dáil in the early 1990s. The constitutional amendments which repealed Articles 2 and 3 were only ratified after the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, and consummated with the St. Andrew's Agreement, the election of the Assembly and the decision of Dr. Ian Paisley of the Democratic Unionist Party to recognise our legitimacy from across the Border. There was also the recognition from Sinn Féin, under the leadership of Gerry Adams, to recognise the legitimacy of the Border, however much it may dislike it.

Against that entire historical background it is necessary for us to realise and understand the reasons the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform is the way it is to this day about security and confidentiality matters, and why we are today discussing the renewal of essential legislation. Very few European countries have the legacy of history that Ireland has in this respect. Some countries like Spain, Portugal and Greece suffered dictatorship for many years. None of the participants in those countries' struggles, with the possible exceptions of the Basques and, to a lesser extent, the Catalonians, disputed the legitimacy of the states in which they were living. They merely disputed who should be in control of those countries, which is a different thing altogether. Our political culture is unique in some ways within the framework of Europe.

We are battling against the anti-democratic forces of terror, violence and unreason which have refused to accept a majority vote. I refer, for example, to the people who brought firearms to Cabinet meetings in the early 1920s as protection. The SDLP famously had a standing order, which applied to its parliamentary party and political group, whereby the first thing its members had to do at meetings was to take out their weapons and leave them on the mantelpiece. The tensions which were caused by the physical violence that surrounded the actions of democratic SDLP politicians were revealed some time ago by the late Paddy Devlin. One cannot live in the kind of environment or culture in which the State lived until very recently without being affected by it. The small number of people who fostered that culture has declined in recent times, as the political process has been embraced by those who previously repudiated it. The Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform, or more accurately the Department of Justice, is one of the bodies that was badly affected by that environment when it was besieged by forces which were antagonistic to the State. Perhaps certain officials in the Department knew far more about those forces than many Deputies who were not party to such information.

Some of my colleagues were probably present in the House when Deputy Howlin spoke about these matters last year. I invite the Minister and the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform to be more open with elected Members of the House, as distinct from the security committee of the Cabinet. While the siege is lifting, it has not lifted entirely. In a world of international terrorism and global crime, we can begin to reform the State's security culture. It needs to be recognised, in the offices on St. Stephen's Green and elsewhere, that certain people have recognised the legitimacy of this State. The historical compromise that has been reached in Northern Ireland enables the vast majority of people who are involved in the political process to recognise the legitimacy of this State, even if they do not like certain aspects of it and are vehemently opposed to those who currently hold office. They have the right, within a legitimate democracy, to hold such views.

I support the proposal to renew the 1998 legislation. The Minister of State, Deputy Fahey, has placed a stark report on the record of the House. He mentioned that 247 people have been prosecuted under the legislation. It would be interesting to get the equivalent figure for convictions. I do not have that information directly to hand. The Minister systematically went through the use of certain sections of the Act, which have been availed of on 277 occasions. That is the figure that has emerged from the rough calculations I have done, although arithmetic has never been my strong point. I suspect that many non-contentious Acts on this House's Statute Book have not enjoyed such frequency of usage in a single year. Such statistics indicate that we need to renew this legislation for another year, particularly in the context of the crossover into criminal gangland crime by some dissident republicans in the South and some dissident loyalists in the North. Now that such people are no longer part and parcel of political movements which have moved in directions with which they disagree, they are engaging in "arms for hire" activities to finance certain lifestyles.

We would be wise to retain these provisions for another year. The Minister or, more properly, the Department might consider in next year's report whether we should retain the Special Criminal Courts in their existing form. Such courts have been established in the past on the basis of evidence of witness intimidation. Today's newspapers report that a recent case in that regard resulted in a successful conviction by jury trial, which is the best way to proceed. However, the Garda fears that there will be a backlash of violence in gangland circles as a result of the trial. It has been reported that people were shot at, and in some cases killed, during a process of intimidation that was undertaken before the trial came to a conclusion. Perhaps the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform will review such problems and make a contribution to solving them next year when it makes decision on whether to renew this legislation.

The Minister and the Department were right to initiate this process of renewal. The 1998 legislation continues to be necessary, sadly. I hope it will become redundant in due course. There seems to be an indication, on foot of the political process, that it is becoming more redundant. Certain people have not made the journey that has been made by those who once marched beside them. That appears to have been confirmed by the reports of an abduction in the last 48 hours, although we do not know the motivation for that incident. The State has a duty to defend the rights of citizens. If citizens' lives are threatened by groups which contemptuously consider themselves to be outside the jurisdiction of the State, the power to protect such people needs to be given by the State rightly, and the Legislature properly, to the office holders of the Government, the Garda and the courts. While I welcome the renewal of this legislation, I ask the Department and the Minister to put in train a process of review of other aspects of our security apparatus, in the context of the progress that has undoubtedly been made, even if the journey has not yet been completed.

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