The Emergency Powers Act 1939 (EPA) was an Act of the Oireachtas (Irish parliament) enacted on 3 September 1939, after an official state of emergency had been declared on 2 September 1939. The Act empowered the government to:
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make provisions for securing the public safety and the preservation of the state in time of war and, in particular, to make provision for the maintenance of public order and for the provision and control of supplies and services essential to the life of the community, and to provide for divers and other matters (including the charging of fees on certain licences and other documents) connected with the matters aforesaid.
The Act gave the government the ability to maintain Irish neutrality during The Emergency by providing it with sweeping new powers for the duration of the emergency situation; these included internment, censorship of the media, postal censorship, and additional government control of the economy.
During the Dáil debate on the act, Fine Gael TD John A. Costello was highly critical of the proposed increase of powers, stating that
... we are asked not merely to give a blank cheque, but, to give an uncrossed cheque to the Government.
Preparation for the emergency was well in hand a year before it was needed, because by way of the 1938 Anglo-Irish Trade Agreement, access had been acquired to the British government's Second World War legal emergency preparations. The Sudetenland crisis prompted the adapting of the British "war book" for Ireland's purposes; draft legislation was already finished by 18 September 1938.
According to Tony Gray, the "Emergency Powers Orders" or EPOs "made under the Act were so draconian that they effectively abolished democracy for the period, and most aspects of the life of the country were controlled by the dictatorial powers the government acquired". The Garda Síochána received extended powers of search and arrest. Compulsory cultivation of land and compulsory queuing for buses were a few topics for which EPOs were made. A total of 7,864 orders were made. One aspect of the EPOs was that, once they were laid before the Oireachtas, TDs could only annul or accept an EPO; they could not scrutinise or amend them as they could with legislation.
Media censorship of radio broadcasts was effected by having news bulletins read to the head of the Government Information Bureau for approval before being broadcast by Radio Éireann. Weather forecasts were forbidden; this inconvenienced farmers and fishermen.
Amendment and expiry
The EPA originally specified a duration of one year. Amending Acts, passed annually, continued the principal Act until 2 September 1946, when it was allowed to lapse. There were also substantive amendments to the Act's provisions; those of 1940 and 1942 increased the emergency powers, while that passed in 1945, as the war was ending, reduced them. Whereas the original Act allowed for the internment of foreign nationals, the 1940 amendment extended this to Irish citizens, in order to combat Irish Republican Army activity.
The EPA finally lapsed on 2 September 1946. However, the state of emergency itself was not rescinded until 1 September 1976.
Continued orders
The EPA's final year in operation began with Japan's surrender, and most EPOs were explicitly revoked before the Act itself expired. The remaining orders would automatically expire when the Act did. The then government wanted to keep many in force, mostly concerning economic and financial matters. These EPOs had been passed under the EPA, not because the powers they granted were otherwise unconstitutional, but because they would otherwise have required primary legislation, which is much slower to pass than secondary legislation. Several acts passed before the EPA expired kept these EPOs in force even after the EPA's expiry. The Law Reform Commission in 2015 noted that most of these EPOs are not listed in the electronic Irish Statute Book and should be explicitly revoked "as a matter of good practice". Some of them are accessible via the Oireachtas library's online public access catalogue.
These EPOs were gradually revoked as standard primary legislation (acts of the Oireachtas) were passed in subsequent years with equivalent provisions. For example: