Peter Mathews (Dublin South, Independent) | Oireachtas source

As Deputies have said in the last few minutes, if someone has a conviction expunged and forgiven through the passage of time, a shadow or cloud will always remain over him or her. In certain circumstances, the person will have to declare and identify that cloud in a self-assessment. There is something profoundly and deeply uncivil in that. I ask every Member to consider how he or she would feel, in the context of true forgiveness and absolution, if one of his or her own family members, such as a son or daughter, who had paid the price of earlier transgressions during a difficult period and had corrected matters and come to a responsible understanding and realisation of his or her obligations as a citizen and the mutual respect that involves, nevertheless faced the enactment of legislation by society which prevents forgiveness. There is something deeply unsatisfactory and profoundly ungenerous and uncivil about it. In Roman times, when there were slaves and punishments for minor transgressions were brutal, people were branded on their foreheads with red-hot irons. In those days, that was the only way to hold a past act of criminality against a person. Why it is so absurd is this. There are crimes of yesteryear which are no longer crimes. Nevertheless, people were convicted of those crimes. The law changes. It is man-made and is often absurd. Most of the time, there is no fairness in it. For instances, insurance mutualisation means that companies prefer to select and profile risks and condemn people into profiled risk classes, as opposed to having an understanding of a family in which one person may have an advantage in his arrival into this world over a brother or sister who has serious disadvantages. Within the family, which is society, we look out for one another. If we do not forgive somebody who has made atonement, which means to be "at one," to reconcile and to be forgiven and absolved, we will have fallen short and been nothing other than miserable, ungenerous, uncivil and inhuman. The amendments as put capture the better sentiments and aspects of what we are trying to achieve in a civil society and a community that allows people to correct for past mistakes rather than to keep admitting to them. It is a form of bullying that these clouds can suddenly materialise again. It is not right and we know it. If a Member's son or daughter had gone through a rocky patch, paid the price for a crime, undergone his or her punishment and not been forgiven by society, what would it say about our society?

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