Robert O'Donoghue (Dublin Fingal West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

Deleting obscure, outdated and often bizarre laws is something we are pretty good at in this country. We are world beaters, in fact. Between 2003 and 2016, we got around 60,000 of them off the books and this legislation will remove over 3,000 more laws and proclamations that remain on the Statute Book as a legacy of empire and a reminder of some of the country's darkest days.

The orders and proclamations that are being removed from the Statute Book by this long-overdue legislation date from between 1821 and 1861 and point to decades in Irish life that were cruel, grim, violent and rife with starvation and poverty. More than 2,500 of these proclamations offer rewards for culprits of long-forgotten crimes. Unless those culprits have almost two centuries of living under their belts, it is unlikely that any of them are going to be caught at this point. The crimes range from setting fires to houses, ricks of hay and barns and mills, to beating people with sticks and stones and even nettles. Rather oddly through modern eyes, it seems that breaking eggs was judged as harshly as arson in this period. Perhaps less surprisingly, there are a lot of proclamations related to potatoes, a commodity we know defined this dark period in Irish history. According to an article published in The Irish Times last Saturday, the aforementioned beating with nettles took place in 1834 in Mayo after attackers ordered two men to sell potatoes on credit. The same article details another proclamation seeking to apprehend the culprits who broke open vaults in the churches of St. Andrew and St. Mark in Dublin and opened several coffins, extracting teeth from the bodies within.

Until these laws are deleted, it will still technically be illegal for any of us to attend a particular meeting called by Daniel O'Connell in 1843 which never actually took place.

As you read through the laws being deleted by this Bill, you get a window into the past - a past where food was so precious that breaking eggs amounted to a high crime and where people took a beating with nettles for the sake of a couple of potatoes. There are Famine-era laws which, thankfully, we do not need anymore and, although the Bill seeks to erase these redundant laws from the Statute Book, we should never forget the circumstances that led to their enactment. The history of this era, the trauma that resonates through the generations from that time, the impact on our population and the emigration and death that flowed from the events of these years will not be wiped away by any piece of legislation, nor should it be. While it is time to put these laws from this era to bed, we should work just as hard to preserve the history in order that we can learn from it and never return to those dark days.

The process that has led to this legislation has been exhaustive and anyone who contributed to it should be congratulated. It has been an important process that has reckoned with our past and sought to modernise our Statute Book. It is progressive legislation and my Labour Party colleagues and I welcome it. Previous Acts have repealed all obsolete primary legislation enacted before Independence and revoked obsolete secondary legislation made up to 1 January 1821. This tranche of repeals will take us up to the 1860s, so our work in this regard may not be finished just yet.

The process which brought us to Second Stage of the Bill involved an exhaustive review of entries from this period on the Statute Book carried out by the Law Reform Commission. It went through some 40,000 secondary instruments to find out if they were obsolete and whether they needed to be repealed or retained. Interestingly, the commission found that only a handful of secondary instruments from this period should be kept on the Statute Book and these relate to boundaries on the River Shannon which were judged to still be valid. The commission stated the process has contributed to legislative clarity in numerous areas and has also proven to be a useful exercise for historians, amateur and professional, with an interest in this period of Irish history. This period has long been a focus for historians and encompasses the years of the Tithe War, Catholic emancipation and the Great Famine. It was a time of great upheaval and some of these laws reveal a whiff of desperation from the empire as it tried to keep a lid on the revolutionary rumblings from across the Irish Sea.

The public and other interested parties were invited to participate in this process and it has led us to this point in the framing of the legislation that is to be commended. It is a Bill with wide support. The ultimate aim of the process is to create a clear, concise and accessible modern Statute Book fit for the times we are living in now and the circumstances that will prevail in the country in 2025. In working towards this aim, we have learned a lot about our past, who we were and where we have come from. If we propel ourselves into the future and imagine the Dáil sitting 150 or 200 years from now, one wonders which laws we are enacting today will seem weird or wacky to the sensibilities of the 22nd century or 23rd century TDs. Many of them might wonder why such a rich country failed to house its people or provide them with adequate public services, but those are arguments for another day. At least we are in agreement with the Government on this legislation. The Labour Party is happy to support the Bill.

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