Aengus Ó Snodaigh (Dublin South Central, Sinn Fein)

Ba mhaith liom fáilte a chuir roimh an Bille Fíneálacha 2009. Is trua é go raibh orainn fanacht chomh fada chun an Bhille a phlé sa Dáil. Is céim beag chun tosaigh é. Nuair a thoghadh mé ar dtús i 2002, dúirt an Rialtas go tógfaí an reachtaíocht seo agus Bille eile - the enforcement of fines Bill - gan mhoill. D'fhoilsíodh iad i 2003. I 2007, foilsíodh an Bille Fíneálacha 2007, ach stop an próiseas reachaíochta ansin. Ní raibh aon dul chun cinn maidir leis an Bille eile. Tar éis seacht mbliana, tá Bille amháin againn, ar a laghad. Tá súil agam go mbeidh Acht cuíosach forasach againn. Ba cheart go mbeimid bródúil as. Tá díomá orm, dar ndóigh, gur thóg sé an oiread sin ama. Leis an méid sin dréachtú agus athdréachtú déanta ó 2002, is mór an trua é nach bhfuil an reachtaíocht níos foirfe ag an bpointe seo. Tá súil agam go nglacfaidh an Aire le leasuithe ar Chéim an Choiste agus ar an Tuarascáil a dhéanfaidh an Bhille níos foirfe. Tá díomá orm nach bhfuil sé ag cinntiú nach rachfaidh daoine go bpriosún muna bhfuil siad in ann fíneáil a íoc ina iomlán. Tá bogadh éigin chun tosaigh déanta, áfach.

I am disappointed the Bill fails to reverse the current position whereby people continue to be detained in prisons simply as a result of the inability to repay a debt rather than a fine. The issue of a person's indebtedness is not addressed in the Bill. Another Bill might be needed to address that issue. This Bill presented an opportunity to address it and it could have been more substantial, particularly given the time it has taken us to reach this Stage.

Section 13 allows the courts to take a person's financial circumstances into consideration when determining the level of a fine with the purpose of ensuring that the effect of the fine on that person or his or her dependents is not significantly abated or made more severe by reasons or his or her financial circumstances. That is to be welcomed. The Bill, as drafted, is short on the detail with the scope for a wide spectrum of judicial determinations in respect of potentially similar circumstances as a result. Hopefully, that aspect will be given more teeth and more detail on it will be provided as we progress through Committee Stage.

I have long argued that there is a need for judicial sentencing guidelines to ensure consistency in the handing down of prison sentences. In this instance, I seek the inclusion of judicial guidelines to address the determination of fines to ensure consistency across the board. There might be a mechanism by which such provision could be included in the Bill.

Section 14 provides for the payment of fines by instalments. This is a welcome provision, especially for people on low income or those who have a substantial level of indebtedness. The courts will be able to take such circumstances into account in determining a person's ability to pay a fine. If a fine imposed is substantial, and the law determines that a fine must be substantial on occasion, it is welcome that it can be paid in this way. The absence of such a provision in the past resulted in the imprisonment of the most vulnerable of fine defaulters, namely, people who wanted to pay their fines but were not in a position to do so in advance of the due date. While on occasion, judges have taken into account people's circumstances and have often been lenient in extending a long period of time for people to pay their fines, to my knowledge, the option to pay a fine in instalments has not been available to most people. Therefore, this provision is a welcome change.

The Bill, in general, is welcome. The fact that the facility to be provided for was not available up to now resulted in a disproportionate imprisonment of social welfare recipients and others on low income in the past. According to British Home Office statistics, 76% of those who fail to pay fines are unemployed. This illustrates how the imposition of fines impacts greater on a lower socio-economic grouping.

Section 17 allows for a community service order to be imposed as an alternative to imprisonment where a fine has not been paid by the due date. This provision is very welcome. More use of the imposition of community service orders should now be made. At least now the courts are being allowed to determine in this respect, given that imprisonment involves a huge cost for the State. It is rarely beneficial and can be detrimental for the individual in question, when one considers what has happened in our prisons ranging from people being murdered, committing suicide to people going into prison not addicted to drugs and coming out addicted to hard drugs. The more people we can keep out of prison and the more we as a society can find an alternative way to punish them or to extract our pound of flesh from them for the wrong they have done to society, the better for society. In this way justice can be seen to be done.

In this instance we are concerned with fines and this provision is a way of ensuring that those who cannot afford to pay or who have not paid fines do not end up costing the State more by their being imprisoned, which was a ridiculous practice in the past. The imposition of community service orders on offenders will ensure that they pay back society in respect of the wrong they have done.

The failure of the Government to introduce such legislative provisions before now has meant that every year fine defaulters make up a significant portion of our prison population. The practice of imprisoning fine defaulters gives rise to serious human rights questions because the deprivation of liberty which should be a sanction of last resort was routinely employed against non-violent individuals. It also confounds the most basic economic logic. The position has been well articulated by the Free Legal Aid Centres when they, like ourselves, over the years have advocated community service and restorative justice schemes as the most cost-effective and appropriate alternatives especially in these circumstances. A report by them has stated:

... the supreme irony is that if a prison sentence is served, the fine is purged. Thus, the State spends a vast amount of resources (court staff, garda time and the cost of the prison stay) and gets nothing in return.

Ireland stands out from other countries in the developed world in this regard. According to National Crime Council statistics in 2006, 22% of all prison committals were for non-payment of fines. The recidivism rate among this category is exceptionally high. That begs other questions. Research by UCD covering the period 2000 to 2004 found that 85% of people jailed for not paying a fine were back in prison within three years. Across the general prison population, 25% re-offend within one year and 50% within four years.

In stark contrast re-offending rates among participants of the State's two adult restorative justice schemes in Nenagh and in Tallaght are much lower, standing at between 10% and 20%. I urge the Minister to re-examine the restorative justice programme with the view of going beyond the two pilot projects in Nenagh and Tallaght in terms of provision. There was a discussion on the programme at a committee and presentations were made in respect of both those schemes. I appeal to the Minister to accept that there is economic sense in using the programme. In terms of the administration of our prisons, it costs €60,000, €70,000 or €90,000 per annum, and maybe even more in some circumstances, to detain a prisoner in prison while it costs approximately €2,500 for a person to participate in a restorative justice scheme. That illustrates the economic sense for developing the latter model. The development of that programme would be a way of addressing not only over-crowding in some of our prisons but of ensuring that justice is done and that our justice system delivers for the public.

Not only does prison not work as a deterrent, which I have demonstrated in the figures I cited, it is not a deterrent to people defaulting on the fines they owe. Furthermore, it is vastly more expensive than its community based alternatives. That speaks for itself. In a media interview in 2004, the Governor of Mountjoy Jail, Mr. John Lonergan, gave some stark examples to highlight the disproportionate nature of, and the gross financial mismanagement that is endemic to, the current situation. He stated:

There should be other ways of getting back the value of the fine from people rather than jailing them. No one would convince me that people who don't pay fines should be imprisoned. Remember that, in such a case, when the court makes its decision it says that it feels the offence does not warrant imprisonment. Surely there must be more innovative ways of penalizing them appropriately, such as via community service.

It is welcome that the Bill addresses this point and recognises the point made by Mr. Lonergan. I refer to some cases by way of example. A County Mayo farmer was fined €6 for not having a tail-light on his tractor trailer. He refused to pay and two days in prison was the alternative. The State paid for a taxi and two gardaí to bring him from Mayo to Mountjoy where he was released the next day and his train fare home was also paid, with a total cost to the Exchequer in the region of €2,500 for a fine of €6. A woman in her late teens failed to pay the correct bus fare and was fined approximately €100. She was unable to pay the fine and was imprisoned for 14 days, at a cost to the State of almost €250 per day or €3,500 in direct prison costs. This is the type of case being addressed in the Bill, and for which I am thankful

Most community service orders operate under the supervision of the probation service. Budget 2009 reduced funding to the probation service by 3%, to €52 million, whereas the prison budget was reduced by just 2% to €386 million. Contrasting the budget allocations to the prison service versus the probation service may be a crude exercise, but it provides an indication of where the Government's priorities lie. The Government was more than happy to waste taxpayers' money during the good times, as evidenced by its stubborn refusal to cut its losses on the Thornton Hall super prison, and it also appears more than willing to waste our money during the hard times. I appeal to the Minister for Finance to properly funding the Probation and Welfare Service because it has never been properly funded. It is more crucial than ever that the probation service is given the funding required. Money will be saved on the prison budgets by introducing the community service but the probation service must have the personnel and resources needed to deliver.

That the Bill would provide judges with an alternative option to imprisonment for non-payment of fines is welcome, but it will take more than the passage of this Bill to make that alternative a reality. Commencement and resources are key and we will be dependent on the Government to deliver these. Unfortunately, past experience does not bode well. The implementation of the alternatives to custody contained in the Children Act 2001 was painfully slow, both because the relevant Ministers dragged their heels when it came to issuing the statutory instruments required to give effect to the relevant sections of the Act and because the Government refused to resource the provisions and, therefore, these did not exist as options for the Judiciary.

I am concerned that section 1 of this Bill contains a similar inbuilt get-out clause for Government. Every provision in the commencement section is conditional on the making of ministerial orders. It took seven years for the Government to produce this Bill and passing it will be the easy part. There seems to be a welcome for the Bill from all sides of the House. However, we will be dependent on the up to now unconvincing political will of the Government for its implementation. I urge that this section be amended so that commencement happens within a very short period of time of the Bill being passed. It is disappointing that the Bill fails to end the practice whereby people who are unable to keep up with payments relating to personal debt are imprisoned. The actual imprisonment trigger in these circumstances is contempt of court. Article 1 of Protocol 4 of the European convention provides that, "No one shall be deprived of his liberty merely on the ground of inability to fulfil a contractual obligation". Article 11 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights makes the same provision. However, between 2002 and 2007 a total of 1,000 people were jailed in contempt of court having failed to repay a debt. This is against a backdrop of an outdated, constrained and extremely expensive bankruptcy system. We also have no personal insolvency system akin to the individual voluntary arrangements made available in recent years in England or to the type of repayment schemes that exist elsewhere in Europe. The numbers suffering over-indebtedness in this State are rising at an astronomical rate. The figure for non-housing and non-investment-related unpaid credit balances rose from €3.9 billion in the second quarter of 1999 to €18.8 billion in the third quarter of 2008. This is a significant jump.

The issue of imprisonment for inability to pay a debt is currently the subject of a High Court challenge. An unemployed mother of two with a total weekly income of €300 is challenging the one-month jail sentence imposed on her for her failure to make weekly payments of €82 to her credit union. We cannot afford to wait around for the final outcome of this lengthy legal process and as legislators we should act now because there is a potential for this case to go the whole way to the Supreme Court and beyond. The House needs to address this issue and we will have an opportunity on Committee Stage to deal with the aspect of imprisonment due to indebtedness.

The Government should introduce amendments on Committee Stage to address the situation. Failure to do so will undoubtedly result in an exponential rise in the number of non-violent people sentenced to prison as the recession intensifies. We have seen companies go to the wall and an increase in the number of applications for repossession orders. There also will be an increase in the numbers facing bankruptcy, insolvency or prison as a result of failure to repay a debt to a credit union, a bank or a credit lending institution.

Speaking of credit lending institutions, I am dumbfounded to think there are credit institutions in this State which are legalised and licensed by the State, who are entitled to charge up to 190% interest on loans or purchases. One of these companies is on the South Circular Road. This is highway robbery in anybody's language. It is no wonder that people end up being unable to repay such institutions. They usually go to them in the first place because of their circumstances. This is a difficult issue but as legislators we have to grapple with this type of highway robbery, especially since it is legalised by the State. It is unjust and cruel to the individuals affected and will further compound chronic overcrowding in our prisons, not to mention the avoidable high cost to the Exchequer, unless we address the issue. Otherwise prison refurbishment or increase in prison capacity would be required and these would require significant investment. We cannot have people imprisoned in the Dickensian conditions which exist in some prisons. We cannot wait around, and now is the opportunity to end the plan for building the Thornton Hall super prison. We need refurbishment of Mountjoy. Greater resources must be also made available to the money advice bureaus which deal with many of these cases.

I thank the Minister for publishing this Bill and I hope we can get it through as quickly as possible with the caveats I mentioned and the need to address some of its shortcomings.

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