Aengus Ó Snodaigh (Dublin South Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome this Bill. It is the fourth if not the fifth such legislation I have addressed, that is, a Statue Law Revision Bill, where the State eventually gets around to getting rid of old British laws that have sat on our statutes. At this stage there are quite a number that are totally superfluous because they are proclamations to arrest people who have been dead for over 100 if not 200 years. It shows how the Statue Book can get clogged up, especially given the over 850-year history of this island being subject to imperialism.

I welcome what the Minister of State said just now. It saves me the bother of repeating what Senator Boyhan had intended. I thank Michael Merrigan from the genealogical groups who have campaigned for quite a number of years and highlighted this as an issue, which is not just a one-off. As the Minister of State said, it is good the public can have that influence through Senators and TDs. It is part of the work we do.

People sometimes identify anomalies in our laws because of their circumstances or interests and in this case there did not seem to be any logic to retention of the Ulster King of Arms. There is a whole debate around the granting of arms and the like. Again, it is useful given the huge number of proclamations now being rescinded or deleted from our Statue Book by this legislation. In the explanatory memorandum, there is mention of 40,000 secondary instruments that were looked at in this case. Only 3,367 of those are being repealed, so the question is: what is happening to the other 36,633? Have they been updated? Are they now part of or tied to our existing legislation or is it that at some stage or other they will be superseded by new laws? I remember in the past some of it was to do with legal title and rights to land. I am not sure about that in this instance. It is not clear. It was mentioned that five instruments were being retained but that will obviously be reduced to four with the removal of one on foot of the amendment the Minister of State proposes.

In all this, I wish those who attempted to go through 40,000 pieces of legislation well. God love them. I hope they now have a professorship or similar based on this. When we look at the titles, they are in some ways innocuous, but it gives a glimpse of the disturbed nature of Ireland in those years because most of them are proclamations to arrest somebody or other for damage to property or in many cases for the burning of crops or the like. There is a reference to the apprehension of persons for the murder of somebody in Aughnacloy. When most people are taught about this period of history in school they are taught Ireland was quite peaceful, that people were very poor and that they did nothing because they all supported Daniel O’Connell. However, if you go through this Bill, you see they were not supporting Daniel O’Connell and his peaceful means at all. They were more aligned with the Ribbonmen or the Whiteboys. Agrarian outrages was the way the British put this across. Ireland was very poor.

AAn illustration of how poor is that nearly half the British Army was recruited from Ireland at that stage. That was the scale of the poverty. People had no choice as there was no money. While everybody who went to school here, and many around the world, will know of the Famine of 1845 to 1850, they will not be aware of the huge number of crop failures not just in that period but before and after that famine. The only recourse people had in many cases was to attack the stores of food the landlords and their agents held. That was a way to try to get food and distribute it among people. People were also being driven off their land and being sent, even at that early stage in the 19th century, to America. Passage to America was being sought before the Famine. It accelerated because of the Famine and that allowed the clearance of huge landed estates across the country and there was a reaction among the Irish at that time. They sought to defend their land and our nationality. The Ribbonmen were often very local agrarian societies. Often they amalgamated and they became just a small local society. There is a history there and some of that history has fortunately been well-written.

A number of specific items jumped out at me. They highlight periods of revolution or risings at different stages across the country. They are a glimpse of our history, so while we are deleting them from our Statute Book, they still exist as part of our history. They will still exist in the libraries into the future. I noticed reference to an "Order preparing a form of prayer and thanksgiving to Almighty God for Her Majesty’s safe delivery of a prince". That sounds grandiose, but then a year later one can see a "Proclamation for apprehending the five men who murdered Matthew Hill, agent, in the Glen of Aherlow, Co. Tipperary".

That was literally at the time when the first potato crop was been failing in County Tipperary and elsewhere around the country. There are those kinds of events. There are other events reflected in these proclamations. I advise people who have an interest in the history of that period to look at them and they will see the proclamations that were issued which capture, even in the short subject matter we have in front of us, what was happening in those regions at that time. In 1849, for instance, in Cappoquin, there was a rising of the forerunners of the Fenians. There is no name. It was not the Young Irelanders. There is a proclamation for their arrest for the killing of RIC Sub-Constable Owens at Cappoquin. That is where one of the casualties of that rising happened. There were consequences to those proclamations. Sometimes people were apprehended; other times they were not. Sometimes when they were apprehended, especially in that period of our history, they were transported to Australia, and there is a whole history there. There is link not just to here but also abroad. It is a very interesting exercise. When I studied history, this was not an area where I would go looking for history or details. In fact, it points that way. It was the same with the other Statue Law Revision Act in that people do not usually, when they are studying history, go to the law books to find out what laws were passed, but this is a treasure trove.

I welcome the Bill and the decision to address the anomaly that is there. I have asked one question. We can come back to some of this on Committee Stage.

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