Pat Rabbitte (Dublin South West, Labour)

That is true; he was a citizen. Uniquely in Irish legal history, the gardaí who conducted this operation were found guilty by the court of the criminal offence of contempt of the Constitution.

The objection to the 1851 Act was that, according to Chief Justice Ó Dálaigh:

a plan was laid by the police, Irish and British, to remove the prosecutor after his arrest on the new warrant from the area of jurisdiction of our courts with such dispatch that he would have no opportunity whatever of questioning the validity of the warrant... In plain language the purpose of the police plan was to eliminate the courts and to defeat the rule of law as a factor in Government.

As the Act purported to authorise the immediate removal of someone out of the jurisdiction without his being afforded a reasonable opportunity of applying to the courts, the Act was struck down.

One would like the time to deal with a number of specific matters of detail in this Bill and we are heading for a long Committee Stage. As I said, I hope, despite the general paucity of legislation, the Minister will provide time to hear people who want to make submissions on this Bill and that we will have an opportunity to prepare for Committee Stage. The rights of separated children, the draconian and unnecessary injunction on lawyers and the right to remarry are but some of the issues we need to tease out. I cannot understand the injunction on lawyers. The conduct of lawyers is explicit in the rules of court. It seems odd to single out the small number of lawyers. A lawyer in Ireland will never become rich representing the cause of people from outside the State. To enshrine this in the Bill is an extraordinary decision by the Minister.

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