Home defence bill unlikely to lead to a rash of bloody encounters.

ST FRANCIS was just addressing a sparrow as Sister Bird up there on the big screen when a man sat down beside me in the cinema and squeezed my 13-year-old knee. (The other knee was the same age, but he chose to fondle only the one on the right.)

I’d been watching a film about saintly gentleness, but, uninfluenced by that soft stuff, I backhanded the man with a closed fist and yelled loudly enough to bring a rush of usherettes with torches they shone into the row where I sat. In the sudden brightness, I looked at the man beside me. My father.

My father, who clearly couldn’t make up his mind whether to be admiring of my right hook or furious at my over-reaction. Knowing I was headed to the Fairview cinema, he’d decided to drop in on Saint Francis and give me a lift home, if he could find me in the dark. When he did locate me, the knee squeeze was by way of a greeting. It took a lot of explaining to the cinema staff and we never saw the rest of the movie.

I mention this because my response to the knee squeeze is a continuing aspect of my personality. I over-react with an enthusiastic hostility disproportionate to my physical strength, not just to knee squeezes, of which I’ve experienced remarkably few, other than the paternal one in the cinema, but to any invasion of my space or premises.

A couple of years ago, when I arrived into the front of the house and, in the process of unloading groceries, brought shampoo down to the bathroom, I found that room so spattered in blood it looked as if someone had impulsively decided to butcher a sheep in the bath using a hatchet.

Now, any normal householder in that situation would retreat. Since someone had invaded my home, the safe option was to go right back out the front door and once out in the cul de sac, to call the gardaí. Me, I grabbed the nearest thing to a weapon that was handy and started to follow the blood spatters. They led to the sitting room, where one of the floor-to-ceiling windows had been half pulled off its runners. After a search of the rest of the house revealed nobody hiding under a bed or in a wardrobe, I put in a call to the local cop shop, which first sent around a car and later a forensics guy.

You didn’t have to be a detective to work out what had happened. The would-be thief had broken the glass unintentionally, leaving a series of Everest-like peaks poking up at crotch level, and then stepped unsuccessfully over the Everests, one of which had got him (or her, although we all, in our lamentably sexist way, thought guy, not girl) sharply at some point in his person that was well-supplied with blood vessels, one of which had been punctured or even severed in the process. Dropping splatters as he went (at some speed, you could see by the angle of the splatters) the individual had gone searching for the bathroom, tried to control the blood flow while standing in the bath and, diapered in my best bath towel, had returned the way he came, stepping on the splatters he or she had made first time around, and, presumably protected by the towelling nappy/bandage, had gone out over the glassy Everests and fled. I observed that a simpler way to get in would have been to get a rock from the garden and break the window.

“When you need a fix, your thinking processes aren’t the best,” the lead guard said.

The forensic evidence was in such abundance, I thought they’d have the perp by nightfall. And said so. One of them muttered something snide about watching too much CSI.

“Matter of interest, what’d you have done if you’d been in the house when the intruder broke in?” the lead guard asked.

“Well, if I could put my hand on the pepper spray I have somewhere...”

She took her cap off, scratched her head, and put the cap back on firmly.

“Pepper spray is illegal. If you know where it is, give it to me. If you don’t, throw it out as soon as you find it. What’s this?” she demanded, holding up the weapon I had carried.

“It’s a thing for tenderising cricket bats.”

All four of us examined the gadget, which had a rock-hard cricket ball stuck firmly on the top of a sturdy short pole. I couldn’t remember who had given it to me or why cricket bats needed tenderising. The forces of the law ignored all that. Instead, they sat me down and told me that in the extremely unlikely event that — as has been my confessed intention — I had managed to brain the intruder with it, I would have been charged with murder.

I couldn’t believe it. They added that even if I had neither pepper-sprayed nor belted the intruder, but that, while on visitation to my home, said intruder had slipped on my too-smooth tiles, I could have been done for that too.

In which context, I was neutral to positive about the new home defence bill, which seems to allow a homeowner to defend their life and property with reasonable force rather than obliging them to evacuate the premises and leave the intruder in possession. However, when the Irish Council for Civil Liberties immediately came out against the new law, I expected to be moved to a more negative frame of mind.

The spokesman on the radio laid heavy emphasis on “the messages sent” by the new law. Those seemed to be headed for two audiences. The first were homeowners, who might get the message that lethal force in defence of their property was now acceptable. The second were criminals, who, realising that message-receptive home owners were now likely to arm themselves to the teeth, would, in preparation for lethal force encounters, arm themselves to the teeth. The inference to be drawn seemed to be that your good old-fashioned traditional cat burglary would now turn into a shootout at the OK Corral.

This ignores the reality hammered home by my unfortunate and inept burglar: the bulk of home invaders are not organised planners given to factoring into their thinking the putative defence strategies of homeowners. The majority are on their own, broke, in need of a fix and driven by impulse. Of that sad, if frightening, group only a tiny minority will encounter the people from whom they steal, and so mutual violence is a rarity, rather than the norm.

Nor will homeowners be turned into vengeful killers by a new piece of legislation. The sending of messages, whether those messages are sent directly through public announcement/advertising or indirectly, through legislation, has a poor track record when it comes to changing behaviours (like smoking, for example). Nor is there evidence of an eager, malleable audience for such messages.

One highly publicised killing, spurred by a maelstrom of paranoia, isolation and previous terrors, does not a murderous cohort make.