Joe Conway (Independent)

At my age, it is not all that easy to be shocked by things but I have to say the bar is being crossed here today by the section under discussion. As a democrat and as somebody who treasures free speech and fairness in public life, I am truly shocked by the proposals in the measure under discussion.Most of us here would remember an August day in 2014 when South Yorkshire police raided the house of a very prominent entertainer, Sir Cliff Richard, in Sunningdale in the UK. The raid on Cliff Richard, his reputation and his standing, from which he has never recovered, was accompanied by what you could call a squadron of helicopters filming the raid from the air. The squadron of helicopters was chartered by and had newshounds from the BBC, who were there watching the ignominious disgracing of a national treasure, as they would call him. This was news media, the BBC news.

People very quickly began to question how in God's name the BBC was so attuned to what was going on in the legal world that it was able to charter, prepare and do all of the infrastructural preparation with these aircraft to film the bringing down of Cliff Richard. Of course, it was manifestly clear it could only have been done with the involvement of the South Yorkshire constabulary, the people who were manipulating the investigation of Cliff Richard on child abuse allegations, which, of course, he has never even been charged with, let alone tried for. Effectively, the man was shattered, his reputation was shot to shreds and he never graced a stage again as far as I know. The BBC had to fess up and it was painfully obvious what had happened: the police were attuned, shall we say, to the newsroom in the BBC and the BBC was given the privilege of passing over £250,000 of the licence fee-payers' money to absolve itself of a completely scurrilous and unfounded allegation.

I am using that as an example. Senator McDowell mentioned gardaí leaking files. Are there corrupt people in police forces around the world? If you are as old as I am and you are reading books, periodicals and newspapers, you will know the saying about how, in every barrel of apples, there is a rotten one or two. It only takes one or two of those to shaft somebody like me or any Member of this House or the Lower House. Let us recall back in the day when it was becoming much more commonplace to talk about child abuse and child sexual exploitation. When I started teaching back in the 1970s, such things were never on the agenda or the horizon, but within 15 years of teaching, it was beginning to creep in and there were more cases and allegations. When we had INTO meetings and would go for a few pints afterwards, the common wisdom then was that we were very vulnerable because you did not have to be guilty any more. All it has to be is somebody making an allegation and you may as well be guilty. In a local town, village, county or wherever, if somebody says a teacher or headmaster is fondling children at after-school sporting activities, it may never come to court and may never come to serious investigation by the Garda, but the reputation of that man - it is nearly always a man - in that locality is gone to the dickens.

Many of my friends asked me what I do up here in Dublin in the Seanad all day. I find this quite amazing because I am only half a year in the job and I find myself standing here speaking to an approximately 10% occupied Chamber, with practically nobody from the Government or so-called Opposition here except for a few diehards, and at the same time we are trying to nail down one of the basic tenets of the democracy we try to live by, that is, the tenet of fairness. Are we going to toss it away on a non-considered section 26 in the Lower House? It would have been a poorly considered section were it not for the intervention of Senator McDowell here on my left, who gave a very trenchant exposition of the dangers of the chasm we are blindly walking across, down into the depths where anything will be possible with the media.

I was making some notes there and I will put on the old spectacles to have a look. I have a speaking note for myself, "Nixon." We will all remember the paragon of the defence of legal rectitude, the man who was the President of the United States, Richard Nixon, whose favourite catchphrase when he was dealing with his henchmen and he had an opponent was to tell them, "Give him something to deny." That is all it took. Is that fair? Is it reaching the bar of fairness?

Look at the other things we have here. There is a questioning about the ability of people and the rectitude of the way they do their public functions. Do the allegations have seriousness? What about the language used? Do we have suspicions, allegations or fact? Was there the urgency in the report that would be at one with the strictures of the Press Council and its equivalent standards?

I also have a note here for myself on Mandy Rice-Davies. I am sure an awful lot of people will not remember Mandy Rice-Davies. She was involved in the Profumo affair back in the Harold Macmillan Government in the UK. She and Christine Keeler were up to hijinks with John Profumo, who was a Minister for defence procurement in Macmillan's Government. This is going back a good way now.