There was a clash of opinions over the payment of pensions to the judges and the court officer who resigned in the wake of the Sheedy early release affair.
The Bill to authorise the pensions passed the second stage.
Dr Maurice Hayes (Ind) said he was a friend of former Supreme Court judge Mr Hugh O'Flaherty, whom he respected and admired. Dr Hayes said he did not condone any abuse of judicial or court process and he did not excuse any acts of misjudgment but there was a standard legal principle that someone should not be tried more than once for the same offence.
These people had lost profession, peace of mind and status, and their families were being affected. They had paid dearly for whatever they might have been perceived to have done, and it was not fair to put them through the mill again.
Dr Hayes said the modern concept of pension was of deferred income, to which people had acquired a right. It would require enormous misconduct to deprive them of this right.
His plea was that the issue before the House should be dealt with simply as a pension matter and that it should be dealt with as a matter of humanity, equity and fairness. It should not be used as a punitive expedition.
The actuarial figures indicated that the difference between the pensions to be paid now and those which would have been due at the end of these people's working careers was between £700,000 and £1 million. If a fine of this level was handed down in the Irish courts, the reaction, he believed, would be of astonishment. Mr Brendan Ryan (Lab) argued that the recipients of the proposed pensions must not be treated as innocent victims of a disaster. Irish public opinion held that the three people concerned, who had not done their jobs properly, to the extent that the Oireachtas was going to be asked to dismiss two of them, were to be rewarded by the system with pensions they would not otherwise have been entitled to. "Let us not dress it up in language which suggests that we are depriving them of something. The issue here is yet again that it appears once you move above a certain level in Irish society, wrongdoing . . . still carries with it a reasonable guarantee that whatever else happens to you . . . you won't go hungry or poor," said Mr Ryan.
Electricity produced by nuclear fission may yet be used in this State despite legal moves to prevent such a development, the House heard.
Mr Joe Costello (Lab) moved, unsuccessfully, an amendment to the Electricity Regulation Bill, to prevent the use within the State of electricity generated by nuclear fission outside the State. The Bill prohibits the use of such an energy source for the generation of electricity in Ireland.
Mr Costello pointed to the difficulty in ensuring that nuclear fission was used in the way the law required. There were very few European grids which did not use nuclear power. The Minister for Public Enterprise, Ms O'Rourke, said she would like to do what Mr Costello wanted but we would be in contempt of the EU if we did so.