Martin Cullen (Waterford, Fianna Fail)

I understand where the Deputy is coming from. The fallout from recent Supreme Court rulings has made everyone in the House very familiar with the importance of providing reasonable defences for offences in legislation. Subsection (7) has been drafted so that the use of a hand-held phone would be considered permissible in two circumstances only. The first would be a call to the Garda or the emergency services on numbers prescribed by the Minister. It would be the intention to prescribe 999 and 112 as these numbers. Calls to these numbers can be traced including, I understand, calls from pay-as-you-go mobile phones. That was the point raised by the Deputy on Committee Stage.

Given that subsection (7) is a defence provision, the onus would be on the person caught using a hand-held mobile phone to show to the satisfaction of the Garda or the court, as the case may be, that he or she was calling a prescribed emergency service. It would be relatively straightforward for a Garda to establish whether a call was to a prescribed emergency service telephone number. As indicated previously on Committee Stage I do not want to remove this defence provision from the Bill.

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