The rights of victims rather than criminals should be protected when they are confronted by an intruder in their own home, Fine Gael has insisted as it introduced a Bill to shift the legal balance in favour of homeowners.
The party's justice spokesman Jim O'Keeffe said the Civil Law (Home Defence) Bill was in line with the Constitution "which states that a person's home is inviolable". The law would shift in favour of the homeowner "in a considered and reasonable way", but it could in no way be described as a "murderer's charter".
Minister for Justice Michael McDowell said the Bill was a "tabloid, over the top effort to create a fuss" and to cut a dash with the "fringe elements" in society. It was an unreasonable, excessive, headline-grabbing stunt, he added.
He called for the issue to be put off for six months to think it through. Mr McDowell said he favoured a Bill introduced by his party colleague Senator Tom Morrissey.
Speaking in the Dáil during a Private Members' debate Mr McDowell referred to an incident when he was 19 and used a poker to hold an intruder at bay in his parents' home, while they called the gardaí. "When the gardaí arrived he did make a run at them and at me." The gardaí acted appropriately, he said. The Minister added that he did not feel the need to retreat and he would not leave his parents at the mercy of intruders.
Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny said he had once been mugged by two people "high on drugs". What he still recalled was the scrape of the knife being pulled from a leather scabbard. It was not a case of fear, he said of such incidents, but of perhaps having to fight for one's life.
Mr O'Keeffe said the law at present is rewarding the lawbreakers and punishing those who abide by the law. He wanted to get rid of the ridiculous anomaly which exists in Irish civil law whereby a person who is an intruder into a person's dwelling can sue the owner of the dwelling for injuries incurred while illegally on their premises.
Insisting that the Bill could not be described as a "murderer's charter", he said the protections in the legislation "will have no effect in a case where a householder kills an intruder in cold blood".
The Bill removes any compulsion on occupiers to retreat from confronting intruders. But he said it did not seek in any way to justify actions "that are over the top or premeditated".
Mr Kenny said the legal system seems "to obsess over the rights of the accused, the tiny minority, at the expense of the rights of the rest of us, the law abiding majority". It was utterly ridiculous and ludicrous that if you do not retreat, if you defend your family against an intruder, that intruder can sue you, he said.
But Mr McDowell said that provision was introduced by Fine Gael and Mr Kenny was at Cabinet at the time. Taking issue with some of the provisions, he said that "if I shove a burglar down the stairs and he hits his head on a sharp object and dies, then none of the protections of this Bill would apply. In those circumstances this Bill is of no use to anyone."
Another incident he cited was that if there was a party going on and somebody crashed a party, all the guests would be exempt from civil liability no matter what force they used.
The debate continues tonight.
