Dermot Ahern (Louth, Fianna Fail)

During the August blitz carried out by the Garda in the Dublin metropolitan region, 808 bench warrants, 549 penal warrants and 55 distress warrants were executed. To a certain extent we are the victims of our own success in that the Garda has been more successful in bringing prosecutions and the courts more efficient in dealing with their business. As the Deputy will know from his practice, many warrants are not executable for various reasons. People who are subject to bench warrants often try to evade their issuance. Clearly that entails much Garda time.

As such a high proportion of the approximately 36,000 bench warrants relate to financial penalties, we will introduce the new fines Bill in the early new year and a pilot project is already in place which has proved very successful in getting an outside agency to deal with the collection of fines. All of those aspects will dramatically reduce the level of bench warrants.

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