Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, Solidarity)

Another year, another cursory debate and then another voting-through of draconian legislation tonight. I will speak against and vote against the legislation but the Government and the vast majority of the Opposition will vote in favour of curtailing basic civil liberties. The Special Criminal Court was established 53 years ago, supposedly on an emergency basis. The original emergency for which it was established was officially declared over in 1995 and yet these Diplock courts have persisted even after they were abolished in the North. The Minister now wants to make non-jury courts permanent, which is very likely to be unconstitutional. Will he commit to putting this question to the people and holding a referendum on whether we want to have permanent non-jury courts?

This year's reports on the Special Criminal Court shows that the use of non-jury courts is at an all-time high. Right now, they are mainly being used for so-called gangland crimes but there is nothing to stop an increase in their use against a politically motivated definition of terrorism in the future. In the last few days, the British Government announced that a non-violent direct action group in Britain, Palestine Action, is going to be proscribed as a terrorist organisation. This means that anybody who does nothing other than say that he or she supports Palestine Action, as I do, could face time in prison. It is incredible. If the same happened here, we could see protestors against genocide being convicted of membership of a terrorist organisation on the say-so of a senior garda without the right to a jury.

Tomorrow, the Government is introducing the Criminal Justice (Terrorist Offences) (Amendment) Bill. This will criminalise glorifying "(including by praise or celebration) a terrorist activity", just as the British State is trying to do with Kneecap. It will have a chilling effect on freedom of speech and artistic expression. It shows the authoritarian direction in which this Government, the British State, Trump and the European Union as a whole are headed.

One hundred and fifty-two arrests were made under the gangland provisions of the Offences Against the State Act last year. This is 40 more than in the previous year. Some 90% of these were not for directing a criminal organisation but for participating in, contributing to or committing an offence for a criminal organisation. All of that is automatically tried in the Special Criminal Court with no right to a jury of your peers, with belief or opinion evidence from senior gardaí accepted as fact and with effectively no right to silence. These very basic features of a jury-based and fair justice system are being denied. Regardless of who is involved, that is a travesty of justice condemned by all major human rights organisations, including the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, Amnesty International, the State's own Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission and the United Nations.

Even the majority report on reforming the Special Criminal Court, which the Minister says he supports, recommended: "The current system of "scheduled offences", under which certain offences are automatically ... tried by a non-jury court, should be abolished." Will the Minister of State tell us now if he supports that recommendation? Can he explain why these draconian provisions are uniquely needed in Ireland but not in all other countries, where jury intimidation and jury tampering can also exist but are dealt with through other means? I refer, for example, to the use of remote juries, which defends the right of people charged with serious offences to a trial of their own peers. No one who supports the most basic principles of democracy should support this motion or should support creating a new permanent non-jury court. It flies in the face of the basic ideas of civil liberties, the basic ideas of justice and the basic ideas of democracy.

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