Part of the debate – in the House of Commons am 12:00 am ar 21 Mawrth 1979.
Mr James Kilfedder
, North Down
12:00,
21 Mawrth 1979
The hon. Gentleman should accept that the measures he describes as draconian, using the words of the then Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins, are effective only to a limited extent. Perhaps, until one gets rid of all the liberties granted to people and until one has created a police society, terrorism cannot be completely and swiftly eradicated. How is this dealt with in Russia? There they use the forces of the State to get rid of people whom they would describe, though we would not, as antisocial. There, such people are put into a lunatic asylum. In our case, we put people into the Maze prison, following due processes of the law.
We have heard a great deal about the blanket protest at the Maze prison. It has received a great deal of publicity. The Provisional IRA has embarked deliberately on this prison protest to win support abroad and to undermine morale at home, by which I mean the whole of the United Kingdom. The aim of the protest is to get people to say"Give in to the IRA ". That is what the hon. Member for Selly Oak is saying. The hon. Gentleman seems to think that the alternative is to get rid of these Laws and to hand over Northern Ireland to the IRA and the rule of the gun.
The blanket protest in H block at the Maze prison is not the first protest of this kind that the IRA has used. It was used against de Valera, the then Prime Minister of the Irish Republic. When he detained people without trial, there was a blanket protest in the 1930s and the early 1940s. Did Mr. de Valera give in? Did he say"All right. We shall recognise you as political prisoners?"Of course, he did not. Although he had fought side by side with them in 1916 he let them, according to one Eire politician's description, rot in their detention and continue with their blanket protest. Eventually, they had to succumb.
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Laws are the rules by which a country is governed. Britain has a long history of law making and the laws of this country can be divided into three types:- 1) Statute Laws are the laws that have been made by Parliament. 2) Case Law is law that has been established from cases tried in the courts - the laws arise from test cases. The result of the test case creates a precedent on which future cases are judged. 3) Common Law is a part of English Law, which has not come from Parliament. It consists of rules of law which have developed from customs or judgements made in courts over hundreds of years. For example until 1861 Parliament had never passed a law saying that murder was an offence. From the earliest times courts had judged that murder was a crime so there was no need to make a law.
