Consistently, socialists who have been elected here have come in and expressed our opposition to these powers being extended. We are in agreement with the ICCL, the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission, the UN human rights committee, Amnesty International, and a myriad of legal experts and civil liberties campaigners. The Irish Government likes to portray our country as a liberal democracy, yet it has this parallel legal system where there are no juries. The ICCL highlighted six defects in its submission on this issue, including lack of a jury; the dual role of judges as judge and jury; the extensive powers of the DPP; the claiming of privilege by gardaí; and the acceptance of beliefs and inferences as actual evidence. Nowhere else accepts secret evidence from police officers as being sufficient to send somebody to jail. I find it highly ironic that we were in here about two weeks ago talking about counselling notes and the Minister of State's colleague stood opposite me and told us there was no way in the wide earthly world their use could be outlawed because of the right to a fair trial being paramount in Ireland. One of the women made an excellent point: how come there is a Special Criminal Court then? You can now waive these rights when it suits you, but the Government could not intervene, for example, to do something that actually affects so many victims of crime. It is highly ironic. We have seen in Britain in recent times things that we never thought would happen. Young people have been charged with terrorist acts, when the offence should have been criminal damage at most, for challenging companies that were producing weaponry to be sent to Palestine to kill people. They will be heroes in history in the future but now they are imprisoned as terrorists. This Government last year transposed an EU directive as to what constitutes terrorist acts. There is a definite movement in the direction of repressive legislation by so many governments. That EU directive includes grounds such as receiving training, travelling for the purpose of terrorism and public provocation to commit a terrorist offence - really dangerous stuff that can definitely be used against activists, including Palestine solidarity campaigners, environmental activists and many others in the future. It is time now to abolish the Special Criminal Court, to get rid of the Offences against the State Act and to stop using this as an excuse again and again each year.

Sentiment score: -0.24