Cathal Crowe (Clare, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to speak on this. Fianna Fáil welcomes and supports the Statute Law Revision Bill 2024 which will simplify and improve accessibility to legislation. There is a whole raft of legislation that I would say is unknown to us. It is buried in the depths of archives covered in dust and cobwebs. It is right to start revising some of this, pulling it forward and making it more modernised.

Can I speak in the spirit of the latitude that is sometimes allowed in this Chamber, if the Cathaoirleach Gníomhach will allow me? We are talking about lots of secondary legislation for the 1820 to 1860 period. I raised this point before with the Taoiseach in the previous Dáil. It is time that we posthumously pardoned people who were convicted in this country for crimes of hunger. There is one for the Minister of State. In my locality there is a beautiful hill called Gallows Hill. The Minister of State can imagine what happened there. It is in Cratloe. The townland is Gallows Hill and the actual hill where people were hanged in the 1800s is known locally as the Carrick. About 200 yards from that is another hill called Cruac-a-Bairile, Barrell Hill, where people were rolled down in a barrel during penal times for theft of sheep, cabbage and basic food items to help a family to survive. These were all crimes committed under these so-called secondary laws from the 1820 to 1860 period. Of course this was the time of British rule. I am not saying that the current State that we enjoy here, the independent Irish State, is responsible for that. Certainly however, as the custodians of this country we have a moral obligation to do something for these people. This has happened in other jurisdictions. I believe posthumous pardons have been given in Australia. It is high time that this happened in Ireland.

If the Minister of State is ever in County Clare I would be delighted to show her Gallows Hill, or the Carrick as we call it locally. It is quite close to my own farm. There are still footholds on top of that hill where the gallows stood 150 or 170 years ago or thereabouts. Dozens of people were killed there for crimes committed just to help their families to survive. This was a hotbed for death and emigration during the Famine period. Dozens of people from my community who did not make it to the soup kitchen or the workhouse perished on that hill for trying to keep their families alive. It would be fabulous if some day the Taoiseach could reference the laws that these people were supposed to have broken and that they would be pardoned for all of that.

In the spirit of this, I will mention my great-great-grandfather. His picture hangs in my office over in LH2000 - he being John Hargrove who lived in that townland of Gallows Hill. He was a Land League leader. Like many people, he spent time in prison - prisons in Galway, Clonmel and Limerick - during that period, standing up for the impoverished and those who were struggling. In the spirit of this, people who were imprisoned during that period for standing up for tenant farmers, for those who were impoverished and for those who were starving should be posthumously pardoned. It is not nice that they have prison records. Someone should go to prison for crimes that are befitting of a custodial sentence, certainly not for crimes to keep their young offspring alive.

That is all I have to say. I have thrown a bit of a curve ball at the Minister of State, Deputy Higgins, but she is busily taking notes. There is smoke rising from the Minister of State's pen which tells me she will carry this note forward to her colleagues in Cabinet. I would ask that some day, here in this Chamber, the Taoiseach or Tánaiste or, ideally, both of them might devote time to making some statements on this. These laws are at the bottom of the staircase leading to the Dáil Chamber. They are old books, as I said, covered in dust. They are leather bound. They are the laws that shackled our people for hundreds of year and by which many of our forefathers were judged to have been criminals when their only crime was keeping their loved ones alive.

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