Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, Socialist Party) | Oireachtas source

The Anti-Austerity Alliance will not be supporting this Bill.

We are, of course, opposed to terrorism. It and all terrorist acts are currently illegal and will remain so, subject to very strict and severe sanctions, even if this Bill is defeated. The Bill represents a broadening of the 2002 Council framework decision on combating terrorism, and that legislation represented a very serious erosion of civil liberties as well as playing into and encouraging a climate of Islamophobia.

The framework decision defined terrorism as "unduly compelling a Government to perform or abstain from performing an act", a definition so broad as to encompass the majority of people active in politics in this country. It is so broad as to include everybody who participated in anti-water charge protests and mass protests in towns comprising hundreds of thousands of people, who could be said to be unduly seeking to pressurise the Government to scrap the water charges. It defines it as seriously destabilising or destroying the fundamental political, constitutional, economic or social structures of a state or international organisation. That definition is so broad that it covers anybody who is opposed to our structure of neoliberalism and capitalism. By that definition, I am a terrorist, and the Labour Party of old may well have been defined as a terrorist group. Some of those that would have come under the definition of terrorism in the past include the ANC in South Africa, which had the aim of overthrowing the racist apartheid constitution and regime, the Greenpeace occupation of oil rigs, which was aimed at large oil companies destroying the planet for profit, and protesters in Genoa against various organisations of international capital. The safeguards introduced by the Council at the time are simply not enough.

The 2002 and 2008 framework decisions are part of a series of so-called counter-terrorism measures that have played a part in the serious erosion of democratic rights and freedoms in the European Union. In total, 239 counter-terrorism measures were introduced in the EU from September 2001 until December 2013. This is part of an international attack on civil liberties, which had its zenith in the US in terms of the USA PATRIOT Act and everything else in the aftermath of September 2001. Those horrific crimes, for which ordinary people paid the price, were used to rightly whip up horror and revulsion against those terrorist acts. They were also used as a whip to try to get people to accept an erosion of democratic rights, giving the illusion that with increased repression and decreased rights in terms of people's freedoms, civil liberties and right to information and data protection, we could somehow eliminate the threat of terrorism. That is simply not the case.

A British social attitudes report in 2007 found that the very mention of something being a counter-terrorism measure made people more willing to contemplate giving up their freedoms. It continued, "It is as though society is in the process of forgetting why past generations thought these freedoms to be so very important". That is the process we have seen over the past decade and a half, namely, the erosion of democratic rights under the guise of protecting people from the threat of terrorism. We are likely to see a new phase.

After the terrorist attacks on Charlie Hebdoand a kosher supermarket in Paris in January, the French Government moved quickly in the wake of the mass revulsion against the barbaric attacks to introduce what is being dubbed France's PATRIOT Act. The Act proposes a fine of €150,000 and ten years in prison for someone holding explosives who had visited the website of a terrorist organisation. Shockingly, it also gives the state the right to block websites and issue travel bans without recourse to a court or normal justice, including the checks and balances when people have their day in court. Similar laws are in place or are being put in place in Denmark and Luxembourg.

In the UK, the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Government has published the UK's seventh counter-terrorism Bill in 14 years. It includes travel bans, internal exile, the ability to stop UK citizens entering the UK and restrictions on Internet freedom. Shami Chakrabarti of Liberty correctly said that these laws are a chilling recipe for injustice. They come on top of the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005, which allows for arbitrary house arrest, electronic tagging and travel restrictions. The right to one's day in court is being dispensed with more and more. Human rights lawyer Gareth Peirce described these measures as "[T}he ultimate demand of any totalitarian regime: the executive is the accuser; the moment of the accusation is also the moment of the imposition of the penalty".

There is a trend across Europe of attacks on democratic rights, which is taking place against the backdrop of massive opposition to the political establishment across the Continent. That opposition and mobilisation is feared by the capitalist classes across Europe and their political representatives. They fear people exercising the democratic right to protest and mobilise in opposition to austerity and other neoliberal measures. It is, therefore, no accident that these draconian laws are coming at this time. It is a conscious use of fear to try to keep people down.

The latest Europol Terrorism Situation and Trend Report makes reference to people engaged in anti-eviction campaigns in Italy. Will the new reports make reference to people engaged in protests against water meters or charges in Ireland? Many will say that those laws and definition of terrorism may extend to people who are engaged in protest and opposition movements that are anti-austerity and social in nature, but they would not be used on those movements. The experience of the introduction of draconian laws does not indicate that will be the case. In fact, writing about the Council framework definition of terrorism, a professor in Oslo University stated that this legislation may not be used in such a broad and generalised way at first, but that we know from long experience that discretionary measures in this area will be employed less carefully and more broadly as time passes when the time is ripe and the need is there. That is precisely what history demonstrates.

It is not enough to simply plead for this Government to promise not to go too far in using this legislation against peaceful protestors. We can consider previous legislation. The Criminal Justice (Public Order) Act was debated in the Dáil in 1994 in the context of dealing with drunkenness and threatening behaviour. It is now regularly used against protestors. It is the main law cited against those who are stopping water meters from being installed in communities where they are not wanted, protestors in Rossport and people who picket workplaces. It is used again and again against those who attempt to fight back. Another example is the miners' strike in Britain, which saw a similar use of legislation used against a major social movement.

This takes place in the context of a culture in which there has been a rise in Islamophobia. In the course of the debate in the Seanad, some incredibly paranoid scare stories came from establishment politicians. One Fianna Fáil Senator implied that jihadists would be training in the Wicklow mountains or on a remote island off the coast. It plays into the idea that the majority or a significant minority of Muslims are terrorists and adds to the idea of a clash of civilisations. The first victims of jihadists were Muslims. The Europol report from 2014 shows that the majority of terrorist incidents and arrests in Europe are not related to any religious motives, but rather to separatists.

There is a whipping up of fear and an atmosphere of Islamophobia and fear about the radicalisation of Muslim youth. We have to understand the root causes of terrorism because, as I said, all of these things are illegal. More repressive laws will not stop terrorism. The things that have driven people into the arms of organisations in some cases are the poverty and precarious situation of young working-class people, the endemic and systematic racism and discrimination faced by young Muslims and other ethnic minorities and an anger against imperialism and what has happened in Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Somalia, Yemen, Libya, Mali and the Central African Republic, all of which have experienced interventions.

We need instead to build a world with no poverty, precariousness, war or exploitation, and no repression of terror Acts will deliver that. Rather, the mass force of people from below can achieve that, just as they achieved the revolutions in North Africa and the Middle East, the overthrow of Ben Ali in Tunisia and of Mubarak in Egypt, despite all of the complications and reversals and counter-revolutions that have happened since then. Mass action by ordinary people holds the key.

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