Allowing use of lethal force would 'up the ante'

LAWS THAT would encourage householders to use lethal force with burglars could lead to more violent burglaries, the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL) warned the Oireachtas Committee on Justice yesterday.

The council’s director, Mark Kelly, said he would not favour a law which would allow householders to justify the use of lethal force to prevent someone from simply entering their property.

This would “up the ante” as burglars would come prepared to meet with violence.

Under the current law, a householder is entitled to defend his or her home but the use of force must be proportionate and householders cannot lawfully kill a person solely because he or she is a burglar.

Mr Kelly said he was not ashamed to say that burglars had rights and they had the right “not to be shot dead”.

However, if they broke into a home and used aggression, then these rights were diminished and the ICCL had no difficulty with that.

Mr Kelly said some Law Reform Commission proposals on the issue had “overstepped the mark” by placing the right to defence of property above the right of life.

A draft Bill produced by the commission would allow householders to justify the use of lethal force to prevent someone entering their property or damaging their home.

“The Law Reform Commission has also suggested that, at their murder trials, householders should have a defence if they use lethal force not only in their homes, but also in their driveways, fields, gardens or yards. This comes perilously close to Michael McDowell’s ill-fated 2007 ‘licence to kill’ legislation, and has no place in our law,” Mr Kelly said.

Fianna Fáil TD Seán Connick recalled how children who raided orchards would always have avoided one or two orchards because they were afraid of the owner or a dog. “Fear does work,” he said.

But Mr Kelly said that, if the law extended the defence of the use of lethal force to outside the home, then technically this could allow for landowners to shoot children stealing apples from their orchard.

Mr Connick said the “trauma, stress, fear and worry” felt after a burglary never went away. His home had been burgled some five years ago and he still felt uneasy when his wife went downstairs early in the morning, in case he heard a scream.

Irish Rural Link chief executive Séamus Boland told the committee he was not calling for a “have-a-go” charter or an untrammelled licence to kill. But if someone broke into another person’s home, “their level of rights should be diminished considerably”.

He said victims of such attacks must know that they have the protection of the State.

Fine Gael’s Jimmy Deenihan said the public perception was that the law was “very much in favour of the intruder” and he asked if mandatory sentencing should be introduced for aggressive burglaries.

Labour TD Pat Rabbitte asked if urban dwellers understood the “acute fear” felt by immensely vulnerable people in the countryside.