Ms Jane Mulcahy:

I wish to comment with regard to burglary. In one of the recent press releases from the Minister, she said that 75% of all burglaries were committed by 25% of offenders. Tied on to this information was the argument about the roaming gangs and the highly organised criminal gangs. If better statistics were available in the State we might be able to unpack this data a little bit to see that in fact most burglaries are probably committed by people who have serious addictions, but I do not know what the precise percentage is. A more complete look at the underlying causes of crime is needed. One can remove people from circulation and incapacitate them, but it is deeply worrying to do this before trial when they are legally innocent. I cannot stress this enough. These people have not been convicted. It is one thing to talk about incapacitation if the people have already been convicted, but it is another thing if they have not been convicted.

I will now turn to the issue of bringing people to trial sooner. We see that the Garda will receive an extra €5 million to allow them to respond better to crime in rural areas, but will more money be made available to the courts to enable the court lists to speed up? These are all related issues. If a young person, for example, is on eight or ten conditions for over a year, the chance of non-compliance increases because that is a restriction of his or her liberty for a very long period. If a person is held in pre-trial detention, the impact on the person is much greater. That time cannot be given back. There is an omission in this Bill on the judicial convention of backdating of sentences. Where that has a statutory focus, then it should be in the Bill. Maximum time limits for remand should also be looked at. Welcome as it is, there are so many actual omissions in this Bill that it really needs a rethink to plug some of the gaps.