Róisín Shortall (Dublin North West, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

I support the amendment. We talked about this issue at length during a few meetings, we put a lot of time into the pre-legislative scrutiny and we had two sessions with gardaí and a number with departmental officials. Many of us struggled with the idea that if somebody was protesting in Cork one week and breached the regulations, and then a few weeks later was protesting in Dublin, there might be no communication so gardaí could take action against the person protesting in Dublin. Where would they have got the information that the person had previously been cautioned in Cork? I think we all struggled to figure out how on earth that would happen. Maybe the garda in Cork records something in his notebook but where does that information go? We never got a satisfactory answer. Officials said that they were confident that gardaí could deal with this but, again, there is the question of practicality. If the Minister can explain it, that would be great, but I cannot understand how it would happen. He is talking about a mandatory record but what happens to that record? That is the key.

The Minister said it is not up to him, as Minister for Health, to regulate what gardaí do but he is, in effect, regulating it under that section. He is saying what gardaí have to do when issuing a warning, and the Bill states that “the member shall record in writing”, so he is regulating to that extent. The intent of this amendment is to pin that down and to have an agreed system in place so we know that the second intervention by gardaí will be on the basis of an awareness of the prior warning, however that should happen. It is an unanswered question that remains from a lot of discussion about it. I have a concern that the legislation may not be as effective as it should be because of the difficulty in that internal communication within the Garda.