Brendan Ryan (Labour)

However, members of a certain political party still use the phrase. Even as they say there is only one army, they then talk of Óglaigh na hÉireann as belonging to them. It does not belong to them. Neither does it belong to the Government. Óglaigh na hÉireann belongs to the people through the Constitution. Only through the Constitution and constitutionally elected Governments, that can also be constitutionally deposed, can one have an army that is truly accountable.

Anything else is a licence for what the Minister is talking about. Let us not heed people who say we are in transition. There is an old phrase that those who would sup with the devil should use a long spoon. People who found these psychopathic thugs useful in their political endeavours cannot say they are no longer connected with them. They are connected with them as long as they tolerate their continuing psychopathic thuggery by their silence.

Let us not pretend that the murder of Joseph Rafferty is the only thing that was done. The current Member of Dáil Éireann for Kerry North was once able to persuade people by the eloquence of his words to hand back stolen goods, apparently by simply appealing to their better nature. Suddenly incorrigible thieves discovered a new side to themselves, handed back the stolen goods and we are supposed to believe it was because of eloquence and persuasion. A member of the same political party not far from Cork reported a drugs incident to the Garda Síochána and the dealer assaulted one of his children. Then the drug dealer was approached by a man in a balaclava and warned as to the consequences of beating up a 16 year old again. These people think that is a great thing to do and swagger around saying as much. Every time they do that they are not just attacking individuals or families but that which keeps us safe. In a political dialogue where I disagree with much of what the Government does, as I will continue to do with varying degrees of coherence, it is a fundamental principle that none of us feels any other member is or implies a physical threat or would even contemplate so doing, whether in the political arena or outside.

Their ambivalence is crystallised in the unbelievable denial of the Sinn Féin leader that he was ever a member of the IRA. How can we have a political party led by somebody who says something that is so much at variance with the conviction of everybody in politics, and everyone I know outside politics who lives in Northern Ireland, who says he was not only a member but an extremely influential member? We can leave that to history but I cannot leave the denial of an unchallengeable fact in the eyes of everybody I know apart from this one individual. That is the fundamental problem. None of us is an angel but one political party claims to itself a right to manipulate the truth in a way the rest of us would not even attempt. We are all in the emotionally and physically demanding business of confrontational democratic politics but none of us claims the right to rewrite history. I am entirely tired of a political party which tells the Minister, Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil and particularly the Labour Party what they did wrong for the past 20 years but, when asked about its own activities in that period, says we must now look forward. Its members look back at everybody else's behaviour but their own. They have given up arms they never should have had or used. As Senator Brian Hayes said these were arms for the use of which there was never a scintilla of moral justification.

I reiterate what Senator Dardis said that the decision of RTE's Northern correspondent to use the name of Gerry Adams and Mahatma Gandhi in the same sentence was one of the most outrageously disgusting things I have ever heard.