The Offences Against the State (Amendment) Bill was described by the Minister for Justice, Equality & Law Reform, Mr O'Donoghue, as "a measured and balanced response proportionate to the threat which the activities of groups opposed to the agreement pose".
Mr O'Donoghue said: "They are measures which have been identified as offering potential in usefully supplementing the existing provisions of the Offences Against the State Acts. The Government is satisfied on the advice available to it that the measures the Bill contains are consistent with the Constitution and our international human rights obligations."
The Bill, he added, created certain new substantive offences: directing an unlawful organisation; possession of articles for purposes connected with certain offences; unlawful collection of information; withholding information and training persons in the making or use of firearms.
Mr O'Donoghue said that when the Bill was published he had described the measures it contained as "harsh", and it gave him no pleasure to be the Minister introducing it. The Government would establish a special committee under independent chairmanship and with the participation of both Government and outside experts to review the measure. He proposed to bring forward the date by which the Bill would fall to be reviewed to June 30th, 2000.
The Fine Gael spokesman on justice, Mr Jim Higgins, said his party supported the legislation and would support any legislation to deal competently and conclusively with those who set out to subvert the State. The party felt, however, that the maximum period of detention in the Bill was inadequate. "We fail to see why armed paramilitary murderers should not be subjected to the possibility of the same period of maximum detention as drug barons. In both cases, we are talking about the deliberate killing of people."
Mr Higgins said that there was an enormous capacity for ambivalence in Ireland. "We have an amazing facility to respond emotionally and with overwhelming generosity to certain tragic events and situations. We have the understandable human frailty of forgetting rather quickly.
"Again the Omaghs, the Enniskillens and the Banbridges are all part of the confused and muddled thinking of where people stand when it comes to the so-called national question. For the past 30 years, we have tolerated so much blowing hot and cold about republicanism and nationalism.
"Much of the annual rhetoric trotted out at Bodenstown was deliberately laced with double think, innuendo and a la carte republicanism. So-called constitutional parties and politicians in the midst of some of the worst troubles in the North still indulge themselves in the four green fields rhetoric and rabble-rousing for their selected audience and for selected occasions while managing to do a quick about-turn the very next day in the wake of some atrocity."
The reality, said Mr Higgins, was that this time last year the "Real IRA" was a small group, ill-equipped and isolated.
"If their identity was so well known, why wasn't there round-the-clock surveillance on these people to monitor their location, their movements and their activities? They should have been subjected to exactly the same vigilance and frustrations as meted out to the drug barons.
"If inadequate legislation was the difficulty, then why wasn't this legislation brought about as a matter of urgency as soon as possible after the agreement in order to head off the seepage of members, guns and explosives to the new movement? The major problem now is that in a matter of weeks this erstwhile embryonic group would seem to have mushroomed almost to the same scale.
"I certainly acknowledge that there were a number of very significant interceptions of explosives, but there would on the other hand seem to have been a naive expectation on the part of the Government that such high-profile interceptions were sufficient to send a strong signal to the splinter subversives."