David Cullinane (Waterford, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I move amendment No. 1:

In page 7, line 4, after “writing” to insert the following:

“, or by any other manner and in any such system as may be prescribed by the Minister in accordance with subsection (6),”.

I am not sure if the Minister read the pre-legislative report the committee forwarded to him following its deliberations. One of the recommendations from the committee was that "a clear, practical and effective system of recording prior warnings be included in the BiIl." The Minister will see that this amendment and amendment No. 3 are related in that the latter provides that "The Minister may, following consultation with the Minister for Justice, prescribe by way of regulation the systems which shall be used to record warnings issued under subsection (2)."

I felt that the best way to come at this was to give the Minister the power, by way of regulation, to consult the Minister for Justice and as part of that, I imagine, An Garda Síochána. Throughout our scrutiny of the Bill, prior warnings were one of the issues that arose time and again. Essentially, the issue is the need to have a process for recording warnings given to individuals who protest in multiple locations. That is part of the problem here. If we do not have a record of warnings, that could be problematic in terms of the enforcement element of this Bill. It was pointed out to us during pre-legislative scrutiny by An Garda Síochána that it does not currently have a facility for recording such warnings. That obviously concerns us because there is no point in proposing a Bill that seeks to take action, which I agree with in terms of the intent of the Bill, if An Garda Síochána does not have the ability to enforce it.

I understood from the get-go that this is a very complex area to legislate for. We accepted that in all of the hearings we had with various witnesses but this was one of the clear recommendations to emerge from our work and I felt it was important to reflect that on Committee Stage by tabling this amendment. It is self-explanatory in terms of how I have presented it and how it was presented in the report submitted following the work the committee did on pre-legislative scrutiny.