Mr. Liam Herrick:

I thank the Chairman and thank members for their questions. To be very brief, a huge amount of the points raised come down to questions of policing. That is appropriate because in terms of civil liberties, the interface between our civil liberties and rights and the power of the State is policing.

Ultimately, when we talk about enforcement there are two possible legacies from all this for the process of Garda reform that is ongoing and before the Oireachtas at the moment. One is a positive legacy in that we have seen more transparency around the use of policing powers during the pandemic. We have seen the Garda play an essential role in protecting vulnerable groups and we have seen, for some period, a community policing by consent model around the four Es which are about graduated engagement, all of which is hugely positive. However, there is another potential legacy too. We had 21,000 impositions of fixed penalty fines between January and 9 May this year. Most of those, 75%, have been imposed on men with 53% being on 18- to 25-year-olds. We have also seen concentrated application in socially disadvantaged areas. We have seen a confused application of public order policing and we have also seen a problem with irregular and uneven policing of protests, all of which could lead to a very negative legacy and a further alienation of some sections of society.

The choice is really one for the Oireachtas, namely, do its Members wish to start removing the criminal justice sanctions and the fixed penalty notices and get back to normal policing? Senator Ward talked about whether these were normal crimes. What we have talked about is criminal sanctions for people leaving their home without a reasonable excuse or meeting other people without a reasonable excuse. They are not crimes in any ordinary sense of the word. They are, appropriately, the subject of public health guidelines, advice and restrictions but other than in the most extreme circumstances when people are of their own volition trying to break the law, they are not properly policing matters. At this point in time we have a choice of roads here. One is to return more strongly than ever to community policing and the other is to potentially damage the relationship between the Garda and the community if we do not start to unravel these controls.