Joe Higgins (Dublin West, Socialist Party)

Tá mé ag roinnt mo chuid ama leis an Teachta Thomas Pringle.

The Offences Against the State (Amendment) Act 1998 was introduced after the Omagh bomb atrocity in the summer of 1998. At that time, we in the Socialist Party trenchantly opposed that atrocity, as we did all the atrocities that took place prior to it, and opposed paramilitarism on this island for decades in advance of that atrocity. However, we pointed out that when sectarians threatened civil war as a result of atrocities carried out in the 1970s and 1980s, it was not repressive legislation enacted by the State or Britain that defeated that drive towards civil conflict which would have been an absolute conflagration and an utter disaster for ordinary people in the North and on this island. It was the mobilisation on many occasions of ordinary working class people in Northern Ireland across the division that forced the paramilitaries and the sectarians back. The record will show that in the 1970s and 1980s in response to horrific atrocities carried out by groups on both sides, the activists in the trade union movement, for example, mobilised onto the streets and in their workplaces tens of thousands of workers in a clear message to the paramilitaries that they were not acting in the interests of the working class people of the communities of the majority. Similarly, what ended the paramilitary campaign was not repressive legislation in the State or the above state; it was the mood of opposition to war, war weariness etc., among ordinary working class people in the North and in this island.

As a Member of the Dáil in 1998, I strenuously opposed this legislation and explained that at the time.

On other related aspects of repressive legislation, the Offences Against the State Act 1939 is a wide-ranging and repressive statute. It is not simply paramilitary organisations that can be the target of that Act. That legislation is so wide-ranging, for example, that a group of citizens who held a protest and decided to withhold their road tax in opposition to a particular aspect of Government policy could be severely punished under it. Other mass protests of civil peaceful disobedience also come under such repressive legislation. My party is firmly opposed to that.

Those self-appointed minorities which are now tiny, the so-called republican dissidents, whose only policy - one could not call it a policy - is the reactionary aim of regressing society back to sectarian conflict, are not representative of anybody outside their tiny ranks, but to impose legislation on an entire people in their regard is in opposition to civil rights and a danger to civil and human rights.

I think I have one minute remaining.

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