PERSONAL COLUMN
The Irish idea of justice
CONSTANTINE FITZGIBBON
The Irish attitude towards the whole concept of justice, and to the whole apparatus of its administration from the policeman on the beat to the High Court judge upon the bench, is essentially different to the tradi- tional attitude of the British and the Americans. There are obvious and valid historical reasons for this difference which has become apparent once again in public i reactions to the recent conspiracy to import arms trials. There are, however, certain misconceptions about the Irish attitude that should be cleared away at once.
One is the myth that the Irish are essen- tially uninterested in law and order, are automatically 'agin the government', enjoy brawling and lawlessness for their own sake. This English view of the Irish temperament dates back to colonial and immediately post- colonial, i.e. civil war, days. It has recently been revived by the latest 'troubles' in the North where mere soccer-type hooliganism is not infrequently graced with a political importance that can be grossly exaggerated. The myth is, in fact, basically untrue. There are of course criminals in Ireland, as there are hooligans, but the Irish, by and large, are an astonishingly law-abiding people by any standards.
Signor Ignazio Silone, that great writer and former revolutionary reared on legends of Irish lawlessness, was astonished when first he visited Dublin to see people quietly queuing for buses, to see small children on St Stephen's Green actually picking up pieces of paper and placing them in litter bins. Indeed one of his Irish friends tells me Silone was almost disappointed that 'the wild Irish' were so much tamer than his own Italians. In many respects the Irish are more law-abiding than the contemporary British, far more so than the Americans. A country that can function commercially with the banks on strike, as has now been going on for some six months, is a country where people trust one another. The last bank strike produced a surprisingly meagre crop of rubber cheques. (This one, however, may well be different.) Murder is very rare, violent sex crimes rarer still. It is still safe for children to wander down remote country lanes, and for their mothers to give hitch- hikers a lift. This is undoubtedly due, in large measure, to the still very great influence of the Churches in the realm of private morality, but also I think to the Irish tem- perament with its traditional desire to be liked, to be friendly. Irish folk heroes are not Robin Hoods and Dick Turpins, nor the bold, bad men of the old American West. On the other hand while they are, in general, law-abiding and almost universally. North and South, deplore the rioting of the last few years in Belfast and Londonderry, they quite lack the traditional, though apparently declining, awe and even reverence that the British and American middle classes give to the law as such. The law was some- thing imposed upon them. in past centuries, by their British conquerork. In that part of the island still under British rule it is being imposed, by British soldiers, today. In the eighteenth century the Irish fought against it, Particularly in the countryside, with such methods, often very brutal, as are available
to a conquered peasantry. In the nineteenth, under Daniel O'Connell's tutelage, they learned to use the law against their foreign rulers and the 'rooted garrison' which was the essential nature of the Anglo-Irish land- lord class. Remote echoes of such alternating tactics are discernible among the Roman Catholics of the North today.
The response of their masters varied, like- wise, between coercion and conciliation. The former meant the use of the criminal courts for politico-economic purposes: the latter the full application of English legal theory, which, save perhaps in cases of treason, for nearly three hundred years has most care- fully attempted to keep politics out of the courts.
From this long, dual and rather confusing experience the Irish reached the general con- clusion that justice is not an end but a means. They also decided that crime is not what you do but whether you are caught —an attitude largely shared by the British and American working classes, who have never loved their bobbies and their cops, but deplored by the lawyers and by the sort of men and women who usually sit on juries.
Finally the distinction between 'political' and 'ordinary' crime inevitably became blurred as it must in any country, or for any minority, that suffers permanent or periodic oppression. We did not expect the German Jews to accept the lawfulness of the Nazis' Nuremberg Laws, nor Palestinian Arabs to regard Israeli law as being either of divine origin or immortal prospect. An Irish jury will not infrequently acquit an accused, despite cast-iron proof of guilt, if emotionally moved so to do—no matter how much the judge, trained in British legal tradi- tions, may fume at them. And there are few emotional levers more powerful to move any Irish jury, North or South, than nationalism.
As a result this so-called gun-running trial of Mr Charles Haughey, whom many regard as the most brilliant political figure and finest Minister of Finance the Irish Republic has yet produced, together with three other 'conspirators' was essentially a self-defeating act on the part of Mr Lynch's government. True, the accused were 'caught', which made them in Irish eyes slightly ridi- culous. True, their conspiracy had apparently also failed to import any guns to send North—which perhaps made them more so. On the other side of the balance sheet the first judge behaved so weirdly (both before the trial, which he said he would not judge, changed his mind, then during it, and finally compelling it to collapse in quasi- legal ruins still open to jurisdiction) and then the authorities blundered on to mount a second trial, with at least one key witness omitted and a jury instructed to forget that they knew anything about the first fiasco. Everybody comes out of it with egg on his face, but the Irish-patriotic eggs looks rather less repellent, certainly in Irish eyes, than the British-legalistic variety.
Various quasi-political trials have recently taken place, or are now in progress. in Britain and the United States. To many they seem to constitute a very grave breach with all that is best in the traditions of Orris- prudence in those countries. This is not true
in Ireland, either North or South, where the use of the criminal courts by whatever government happens to be in power, for its own political ends, is very much déjà vu. If the British genuinely wish to retain control of the Six Counties of Ulster, they would be well advised to remember that in Irish eyes, North or South, Roman Catholic or Protest- ant, the arrest and sentencing of prominent figures such as Miss Bernadette Devlin MP or the Rev Ian Paisley MP is in every meaning of the phrase political suicide.
What the political results of this Dublin trial will be is, of course, beyond prediction. The average man, the man on the Dalkey bus, believes at present that it will have secured the premiership for Mr Charles Haughey within a matter of months. That it will also have in some measure discredited our Irish legal apparatus, indeed maybe our whole system of democratic government, is both important and unpleasant. But then few people, anywhere, attach as much import- ance these days to form as once they did. The lawyers may adopt expressions of horror. The businessmen want to know when the bank strike is going to end: the house- wife when the price of potatoes and elec- tricity will stop going up: her husband, why Guinness costs more here now than in England.
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