Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent)

I, too, have serious concerns about this. On first reading of the Bill, you would think it is fairly innocuous, in that we are going to punish the receipt of training for terrorism, and travelling and organising it. Then you look at it more clearly and you will see we are amending legislation from 20 years ago to make it stronger. We are doing it on the basis of a directive that we were not obliged to buy into but nevertheless we gave our word to it. We are adding in three new things, including what has already been referred to - the public provocation to commit a terrorist offence.

We are doing this on the basis of a directive that itself is extremely problematic and has been highlighted by the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights and by a whole European network of national human rights institutions, which made a number of recommendations. We seem to have ignored all of that, and the European Commission itself noted difficulties with proving legislative intent, and that some member states find it challenging to qualify violent extreme right-wing acts as acts of terrorism, which the Commission noted to be crucial to ensuring the directive is applied in a non-discriminatory manner. We have a directive that was brought in without complying with essential procedures at the time, a directive that is proving difficult itself, and yet we have the Commission going on and prosecuting or taking infringement proceedings against over 20 countries that have not implemented the directive that is extremely faulty.

We are going on another level altogether, a bizarre level where we do not need to implement this directive but we are bringing in legislation that is seriously problematic. I again thank the library staff for all their work on this. I do not have the time to go into the concerns raised but they are laid out in black and white, and we are absolutely ignoring them.

I look at how terrorism is defined. Of course we all need legislation that deals with and prevents terrorism, but that terrorism must be analysed within a broader remit. If we in this Dáil cannot recognise that Israel is a terrorist state, then we are in serious trouble. We have not condemned Israel for attacking Iran without provocation. Israel went in and bombed nuclear sites with all the problems that entails on the basis that the Iranians had weapons or was almost ready to have weapons so Israel took pre-emptive strikes. The Government, and the Minister for Justice, do not seem to have any problem with a terrorist state taking action against all international law. Everything has to be done on the basis of trust. While at one level I am agreeing with the Minister that this is necessary, when we actually look at it, we see how problematic it is. Then we have the tunnel vision that will only look one way at terrorism but will not look at the real terrorist acts that have taken place. We are losing count of the number of dead people on the ground from bombs, destruction, starvation and from depriving them of water. We see Palestinian children and fathers and mothers being shot. I hate the picture but it is like going to a fair where there are moving targets. The army is shooting moving targets and killing. We are standing idly by. We do not define terrorism here; we look at terrorism in very general and expansive notions that should have no place in legislation, including "Public provocation to commit terrorist offence" and "that glorifies [..] a terrorist activity". I do not think I have ever seen the word "glorifies" in legislation. Perhaps it was taken straight from the 2005 Act. If so, we should not reuse it. If not, it has no place. Glorification is something I have seen in church prayers and in religion. To glorify is way too broad.

I am taking Israel and Palestine and looking at what has happened there. We stood idly by when Amnesty International said that Israel was operating an apartheid state. I mentioned this many times. It is important to keep saying it because this and the previous Government, and the current Taoiseach, told us they were uncomfortable with the word "apartheid". We never discussed the report because the Government was uncomfortable with the word "apartheid" being used in relation to Israel. Then Israel designated six human rights organisations, two of which we fund directly, as terrorist organisations. I ask the Minister to stay with me for a minute. If we are allowing Israel to designate six human rights organisations as terrorists, does that not make a mockery of an open analysis as to what terrorism is? We allowed that to happen on our watch. The EU came back and said there was no evidence that they were operating as terrorist organisations and still that happened.

Today, the Minister is bringing to us a Bill that has not been subjected to pre-legislative scrutiny. That in itself is appalling because all the issues around this should have been teased out through pre-legislative scrutiny. There is no urgency to this Bill in the sense that we never had to comply with the directive. Pre-legislative scrutiny is there to tease out these issues. I am grateful and delighted to have six or seven minutes to speak on this, but this should be teased out at pre-legislative scrutiny. The committee waived this scrutiny but it should not haven. It is very important that we tease out this. We would get an opportunity to look at how terrorism arises, who the biggest culprits are and what money is going into it but we will do none of that while we go down a tunnel of looking at very vague terms like "glorifying" and "incentivising".

See this speech in context