Louise O'Reilly (Dublin Fingal, Sinn Fein)
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In head 5, under the section Offences and Penalties, subhead 14, it states that "authorised officers will have discretionary powers to impose administrative penalties in lieu of criminal prosecutions for violations of control of export laws". Could Dr. Cahill give us an update on this? To me, that is fairly wide-ranging. I am not suggesting at all that any person involved would come with the intent of abusing it, but the potential is there, so what checks and balances will be in place? Being able to use a discretionary power to impose an administrative penalty in lieu of a criminal prosecution is a fairly heavy-duty power. What sorts of checks and balances will be there for these authorised officers to ensure that they exercise that discretionary power hardly at all? It has to act as a deterrent, but there surely must be some checks and balances in place to make sure that this quite substantial power is not abused in any way.