Mary Upton (Dublin South Central, Labour)

The Minister asked the House, as he introduced the Criminal Justice Bill for its Second Reading in February 2005, to accept the bona fides of his motivation in seeking to introduce a Bill substantively different on its Second Reading from what first came before the House. Now a year later we are being asked to approve a measure which will force a committee of this House to consider legislation that bears even less resemblance to the Bill which received a First Reading here. Having already introduced substantial amendments to the legislation, the Minister now has to ask the House to vote on driving a coach and four through Standing Orders. He finds himself in this anomalous situation because he wants to introduce more than 171 pages of new amendments to the Bill, as initiated.

The Minister is setting a precedent for the future that will be welcomed by anyone seeking to undermine democracy. In the words of the Irish Human Rights Commission: "bringing forward substantial amendments of this scale at the Committee Stage of the legislative process inhibits the proper consideration of the issues by the Oireachtas, as the effect of introducing substantive changes in this way is to circumvent the earlier legislative stages".

There may well be other measures that, with a little bit of tweaking, deserve to be passed into law by this House. However, there are no measures in this Bill whose necessity could not be foreseen when the original scheme of the legislation was approved by Government in 2003. If this motion is passed, we shall never have the opportunity to properly debate the issues involved. I question whether the Minister has fully thought through the implications of introducing such elephantine amendments to this Bill upon future generations of legislators in this House. Such legislators may be more interested than the Minister is in circumventing inhibitions on the freedom of the House to introduce undemocratic and anti-human rights legislation. I also question whether, given the long germination period of this legislation, he has properly considered the wide ranging human rights implications of the content he seeks to introduce into this Bill at this stage.

The Irish Human Rights Commission has stated the following general point of principle as regards criminal justice legislation: "Any legislative proposals to increase the powers of the Garda should be subject to careful scrutiny in order to ensure that the correct balance is struck between, on the one hand, the rights of everyone in society to have a police service capable of effectively detecting and prosecuting crime and, on the other hand, the rights of the individual to the enjoyment of the full range of his or her human rights and freedoms."

One of the chief safeguards the Minister has cited as an assurance that the correct balance is being struck between the right of people to have an appropriately empowered police force, on the one hand, and the right of individuals to the whole range of their human rights, on the other, is the Garda Ombudsman Commission. Yet the Garda Ombudsman Commission is not yet tested. How do we know it will work in its present form when confronted with existing forms of Garda misbehaviour? For instance, if the Minister has his way, a garda will be able to take a swab of DNA from the inside of a person's mouth without his or her consent. If the person keeps the mouth closed, then the garda will be able to use reasonable force to open it and swab him or her. Merely by keeping the mouth shut, in such circumstances, a person would be guilty of the offence of obstructing a garda in taking a DNA swab. I cannot say that I am against the principle of forcible DNA swabbing of suspects in all cases. Nor can I say that the Criminal Justice Bill 2004, where it refers to this, gets the balance wrong. Since I have not had sight of the Bill, that would be premature. Yet the Minister insists on introducing vast amounts of new powers into legislation without allowing for proper consultation to take place.

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