Seán Crowe (Dublin South West, Sinn Fein)

The Government is inserting more than 200 amendments into a Bill with just 38 sections. The time allowed to comment on the new sections and even to digest them has been grossly inadequate. The Minister's war on fundamental rights is at the heart of this overwhelmingly regressive Bill and at the heart of the process surrounding its introduction. The Bill should be withdrawn. If the Minister is hell bent on introducing the wide-ranging provisions contained in this legislation, he should submit a number of focused Bills allowing full Oireachtas scrutiny and debate on each one.

Over the course of the debate on this motion my colleagues will highlight the threats it poses to the most basic and fundamental civil liberties. Deputy Ó Caoláin will outline our concerns relating to the Minister's efforts to roll back on child protection by lowering the age of criminal responsibility, failing to address the plethora of grave problems in St. Patrick's Institution, removing responsibility for the detention of children from the Minister for Education and Science, and lifting restrictions on the identification of children in criminal proceedings.

Deputies Ó Snodaigh and Ferris will examine the motives behind and the potential effectiveness of new sections relating to gangland crimes, conspiracy, drugs, sentencing and electronic tagging. They will focus on the human rights compliance of the proposed legislation or rather the non-compliance of same.

I wish to focus on the provisions for anti-social behaviour orders contained in the new sections, Parts 11 and 13, of the Bill. ASBOs are flawed in that they are contrary to fundamental human rights and they do not work. Sinn Féin opposed the introduction of ASBOs to the Six Counties and will continue to oppose their introduction here. The Irish Youth Justice Alliance, a coalition of organisations and individuals who work towards reforming the juvenile justice system, has outlined many of the problems with ASBOs. Among these are the fact that as ASBOs involve the imposition of penal sanctions for the breach of an order made in civil proceedings, they are inconsistent with the European Convention on Human Rights. Furthermore, the conditions imposed by an ASBO may involve a disproportionate interference with personal and private rights, and civil liberties.

Breach of an ASBO is a criminal offence but because ASBOs are civil orders, the rules of evidence are reduced and the burden of proof is on the balance of probabilities rather than beyond reasonable doubt, which undermines and denies the right to a fair trial. In cases involving criminal proceedings against children in particular, the normal safeguards should be augmented and not diminished. ASBOs run contrary to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and to international standards and guidelines on youth justice.

In particular, the Government's proposals run counter to the central logic of the Children Act 2001 which, by the admission of the Minister of State with responsibility for children, is an Act that "is regarded as setting a framework for a modern and progressive youth justice system [and] reflects best international practice". The Children Act 2001 was 30 years in the drafting. In the past five years, the Government has failed to put into operation and resource the Children Act.

While the definition of anti-social behaviour employed by the Minister is a marginal improvement on that used by the British, it is still too vague and the core problems I have outlined still stand. In addition, the stages prior to the application for an ASBO on a child suffer from an unfettered assumption of Garda infallibility. This is neither in the interests of the child nor in the interests of the Garda Síochána. Of equal importance is that it is not in the interests of public confidence in it.

In Tallaght today before coming to the House I met a single mother of one child who told me of her family having been petrol bombed. The Garda was investigating the incident. Her house was petrol bombed because young thugs from the area called to the house looking for money for cigarettes and when she told them to get away from the door, a petrol bomb was thrown at the house. Another woman to whom I spoke in recent days had her garden wall knocked down and every night young thugs sit on bollards beside her house shouting, roaring and basically terrorising her in her home.

The Government is attempting to legislate away complex problems that, by contrast, Sinn Féin recognises require the resourcing and implementation of existing laws and investment in communities. The Bill, old and new, amounts to a grave and disproportionate assault on fundamental human rights.

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