Prevention of terrorism legislation was renewed by the Dáil for another year as Minister for Justice Michael McDowell stressed that dissident republicans were "willing to peddle their expertise" to organised criminal gangs and Sinn Féin claimed the Act violated international law.
The Offences Against the State (Amendment) Act 1998 was reaffirmed by 95 votes to 14 with Sinn Féin, the Green Party, a number of Independents and the Socialist Party deputy opposing its renewal.
Mr McDowell said those responsible for the Omagh bomb "and others like them, continue in their fanatical way to pursue, plan and promote campaigns of violence".
"The enemies of peace have not gone away." Gardaí had intercepted a bomb at the West Link toll bridge to be used as part of a feud between drugs gangs. "It is a serious matter when so-called republicans provide material of this kind to thugs who are killing ordinary teenagers by supplying them with drugs and killing each other to maintain their positions of strength."
Fine Gael's justice spokesman Jim O'Keeffe said the most compelling reason for renewing the legislation was that some of the killers of Det Garda Jerry McCabe remained at large. He said that anyone with information on this matter had a duty to make it available to the gardaí and he was "absolutely outraged to learn recently of statements by a member of this House indicating he would not be prepared to make such information available to the Garda.
"That member has a case to answer if he is presenting himself to the public as a democrat, a person who has converted entirely to the democratic system."
The Minister agreed with him and naming Sinn Féin deputy Martin Ferris he said that "under article 9 of the Constitution all citizens owe this State a fundamental duty of loyalty. If one does not like that, one should not be in this House".
He said "the real reason that Deputy Ferris made those remarks is that he still clings to the idiotic ideology of the Provisional movement, that somehow their acts were not crimes because they were carried out at the behest of the army council, in whom the idiots all believe, the Irish people's powers of government are somehow vested".
Labour's justice spokesman Brendan Howlin expressed concern that "sunset clause legislation", with a set time limit, "has a habit on occasion, especially in the security area, of becoming a fixed entity.
"Laws enacted in the early 1970s are now permanent, although notionally temporary, features of our legal system and criminal code." If there were sections of this Act which should form part of the permanent law, "we should have that debate and make the necessary arrangements".
Sinn Féin's justice spokesman Aengus Ó Snodaigh believed the Act had a highly corrosive effect on human rights, civil liberties and democratic life in the State. The continued operation of some of the sections which had never been used, "is a violation of Ireland's requirements under the derogation regimes of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights".
It was also contrary to the Belfast Agreement "which requires steps towards security normalisation, including the progressive elimination of the Acts' provisions as circumstances permit".
Finian McGrath (Ind, Dublin North-Central) said the republican movement "has shown leadership and we should support it in this issue, particularly following its dumping of arms last year. There is an onus on us as members of the Oireachtas to show leadership in the peace process and to be prepared to support those who are taking the major risks."
