Ms Fíona Ní Chinnéide:

I thank and welcome Deputy Pringle. It is interesting that we have an imagined public that has pitchforks at dawn. We have to look at the scale of the issue. There is an absolute silence and invisibility around this issue because, by virtue of the fact people do not want to disclose their convictions, they are not talking about it and they are not appearing as case studies and information.

It would be useful if the Courts Service were to carry out some research to identify exactly how many people have convictions. There is a new chief information officer in the Department of Justice and Equality and a new data research strategy, which are welcome in identifying the scale of the issue. In the United Kingdom 11 million people, or 16.5% of the total population, have at least one conviction. Proportionally, that would equate to more than 750,000 people in Ireland, although one must be careful in matching because it is not a direct correlation. Nevertheless, it is in the hundreds of thousands. A Scottish Government analysis has shown that 38% of men and 9% of women born in 1973 have at least one criminal conviction. It extrapolated to the population as a whole, which suggests at least one third of the adult male population and almost one in ten of the adult female population are likely to have a criminal record. Given the scale, the imagined public is affected by having a history of convictions. Just as every family contains somebody who has been a victim of offending, we also know somebody who has committed an offence. Data would be welcome, but the welcome would perhaps be silent.