Dáil deputies in jail: Farce highlights bizarre system

THE jailing of Dáil deputies Clare Daly and Mick Wallace, however briefly, once agains highlights how very bizarre our justice and penal systems have become.

It also highlights the absurdity of public representatives breaking the law to try to confirm beliefs they first sought to have confirmed through our parliament. There was of course a degree of grandstanding in the deputies’ visit to Shannon Airport, but had our parliament offered the information sought by the deputies, or offered a good reason for not providing it, the whole fiasco might been avoided.

The episode shows that fines are a more or less pointless sanction unless the State can take them from an individual’s income and underlines the urgency in introducing promised legislation to facilitate that possibility. This measure would end the farce of gardaí acting as hackney drivers delivering those who won’t pay fines to prisons thereby freeing them to do real, productive police work.

The core issue of the fiasco — the use of Shannon Airport by American military — points again to one of our least attractive traits. We are very happy to engage with the American military on a commercial basis but when anything more is required we will bolt to the high moral ground, or at least what we imagine is the hight moral gound, and bleat about our neutrality. We can’t have this both ways either, we’re either one or the other.