Michael McDowell (Dublin South East, Progressive Democrats)

The Government and I are doing all we can to ensure that the CC judgment does not unlock the gates for convicted perpetrators of heinous crimes. We are mounting a case in the Supreme Court in which we are making the case that justice and common sense and the constitutional values that protect the victim, society and the criminal justice system, and maintain certainty in the criminal law, must take precedence over abstract theory and the opportunistic right of very dangerous men to escape justice on foot of a judgment that had no relevance to the facts of their cases or convictions, or their pleas of guilty in some cases. That matter now lies in the hands of the courts. It is for the courts to determine the consequences of their own orders.

The Supreme Court decision of 23 May struck down the core and most heavily used statutory provision in our criminal code in regard to unlawful carnal knowledge of under age children. The court found that the absence for an accused person of the right to claim that one was mistaken as to the age of the victim was so great an infirmity from the constitutional point of view that the entire section 1(1) of the 1935 Act had to be declared null and void, both retrospectively and going forward.

As a lawyer who worked in the criminal courts for a great many years, both prosecuting and defending persons in trials for this very offence, I was considerably surprised. Indeed, I was shaken by the scope of this Supreme Court decision.

See this speech in context