Mary Seery Kearney (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Chair and I thank the witnesses for their very powerful opening statements. I was called to the Bar and did my first year in devilling in criminal law, which involved a lot of prison visits. That experience of closed doors and absolute control over your life when you go through them has haunted me since. From my very first visit to subsequent visits during that year, I came away with that sense of helplessness. How frightening that must be for someone entering into the prison system for the first time. If a person has a mental health illness or issues, intellectual disabilities, or any disability, how much more helpless must that person be? That came across strongly, particularly in Ms Brady's opening statement.

Establishing the data is very important, as are establishing rights. How are rights vindicated in the prison system for people with disabilities? I went on to be an employment lawyer so I am used to disability under both the Equal Status Act and under the Employment Equality Act 1998 and the vindication of rights for people with disabilities in that context, but how is that in the prison system? The threat and the experience of bullying must be all the more if a person is obliged to hide a disability. I appreciate any advice back on how the committee might do that.

It is very powerful to hear the sheer number of people against whom section 12 is being used, and it is quite frightening. While I understand its necessity in law and that there is a necessity to have that power in certain, very exceptional, circumstances, it strikes me that the training and competencies should be questioned. I have enormous respect for the Garda Síochána, but in the heat of a moment, what checking or oversight is there of its members' discretionary use of this? We have checks and mechanisms in other areas of criminal law that safeguard against the exercise of Garda discretion in situations like that, but what systems are there and what recourse to appeal is there? It would be important to hear that.

Coming back to Ms Murphy, it horrifies me every time there is a major incident or a significant incident in the country that there is a rush to judgment of mental health issues. This instant rush to judgment always belies an unconscious bias at national level. The presumption is that once you have a mental health issue at all, somehow you are out of control and you must be curtailed and corralled. There is a whole appalling discriminatory attitude that follows that. Ms Murphy's contribution has articulated very well the programme she runs to expose that unconscious bias. Given the vulnerability of suspects, what can we do to support them? Might we ensure they have representation beside them so they are not left vulnerable? Perhaps I had best leave it there. The erosion of the presumption of innocence once any sort of mental health issue manifests concerns me, regardless of whether that issue has always been there - it may have been diagnosed and gone untreated - or is being exacerbated by being in a situation where you are a suspect or in the prison system. What more can we do and how can we do it?