Dr. Ian D. Marder:

I thank members for having me at the committee. I am a criminologist at Maynooth University and among other things I sit on the Department of justice's youth justice advisory group, which oversees the implementation of the recent youth justice strategy. I also collaborate on research and policy and practice development with a number of organisations of relevance to this committee's work, including the Garda, the Probation Service and several youth justice and restorative justice organisations in the community sector.

I support the intention of the Bill to address the ageing out problem in youth justice, but primarily I propose that as we are opening up the Children Act, we take advantage of those amendments to make further changes that would ensure Ireland holds its place as a world leader in youth justice.

First, this is a great opportunity to extend the protections and the young person-sensitive facets of the criminal justice system to young adults up to the 25th birthday. The scientific basis for this is accepted in the Department's youth justice strategy and has been implemented in a growing number of youth justice systems around the world, including Scotland, Germany and the Netherlands. It is not necessary to have an entirely new legislative system for young adults. It does not need to be legally complicated. There will be practice-based issues to be addressed but we can take advantage of this chance to increase the age to which existing legal provisions apply by revising the definition of "relevant person" in the new section 70A to include this cohort.

Second, it is also recognised in the youth justice strategy that we could use this process to strengthen the family conferencing provisions starting at section 78 of the Children Act. These sections are very specific and well developed. They allow for flexible restorative justice processes that can include victims or a young person’s family or other significant people. Northern Ireland has shown this is part of the puzzle of keeping children out of prison in ways that also help victims recover from crime, where a child’s rights are not infringed by participation. I recommend looking at what has been achieved in Northern Ireland through systematic referrals to restorative justice and the correlating drastic reduction in children in prison and considering what we can learn from this. Those family conferencing provisions are seldom used here. There are years in which the number of those sits at zero or one and many others when it sits in the single digits. The Courts Service’s annual report for 2024 notes 3,922 orders were made in the District Court relating to youth last year, including 150 orders of detention. This suggests there is potential to use restorative justice to reduce those numbers here. In amending this Act we could strengthen the referral process so more people are considered for restorative processes. For example, the court might be required to give reasons why it has not referred a child to a conference or there might be a requirement to make a referral or to seek a probation officer’s recommendation as to whether a family conference is appropriate.

Third, as the amended Bill introduces a number of new or different sanctions, I urge some caution when introducing new sentencing measures that permit intensive alternatives to prison to ensure they are used only to reduce the sentencing tariff for children and not to up-tariff them. This is where a person receives a sentence greater than they would have done were a new sentence type not introduced. That has been a problem in sentencing regimes in other countries.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, this is a good opportunity to raise the age of criminal responsibility, which is far too low in Ireland and out of line with both mature democracies across Europe and with the principles of the Children Act itself. I thank the committee.