Charles Flanagan (Laois-Offaly, Fine Gael)

However, of that overtime, an amount in excess of €10 million has been expended on gardaí going to Criminal Courts and District Courts during their time off. It has been suggested that up to 1,400 gardaí per day spend their time in District Courts and Circuit Courts throughout the country. It is important that the law can be reformed to allow for a court sergeant in charge to engage in the type of duties that will allow for cases to be heard in a way that is satisfactory to the courts and the communities while at the same time obviating the need to have hundreds of gardaí waiting in queues to have cases heard. I look forward to progress in this regard.

The Bill refers to bail and bail recognisance and I compliment the Minister on the changes to be made. It is a sensible move to allow a District Court clerk and other public officials to take bail recognisance in certain cases without the need for the applicant to return to court on each occasion. The expansion of the range of persons who can take a recognisance in the case of an appeal from the District Court is a move towards the smoother administration of justice.

Earlier this week, I was interested to hear the Minister speak on proposals for bail reform and I invite him to expand on and develop his thoughts. The statistics in respect of offences committed by those out on bail are truly frightening. We must remind ourselves that suspects for eight murders carried out last year and 13 committed in 2007 were out on bail. It is estimated that 24 sex offences, all of which were serious, were committed by persons on bail during 2008. Last year, 34 suspects out on bail threatened to kill people, up from 30 the previous year.

The Minister has spoken in the House and outside it on his intention to electronically tag sex offenders. I am surprised the Minister has not made a similar commitment in respect of those out on bail while awaiting court hearings. To introduce electronic tagging for sex offenders and not have a broadly based programme to include many of those out on bail makes little sense given the fact that on the one hand seven out of eight applicants receive bail, and on the other those out on bail commit thousands of offences every year.

The main reason we are enacting this legislation in the autumn of 2009 is to facilitate the new criminal court complex as outlined by the Minister. I compliment him, his officials and his predecessors on this initiative. Everyone in the House will agree that a professional and streamlined criminal court system is essential for the effective and efficient administration of justice. If we get the surge in criminal prosecutions the Minister has promised under the Criminal Justice (Amendment) Act 2009 we can expect this new complex to be very busy, especially the Special Criminal Court. We look forward to monitoring progress in this regard.

The concentration of the criminal courts in a single complex is to be commended. While engaging in a specific custom-built court complex for criminal law we should not lose sight of the other arm of the law that is in need of its own custom-built block, namely family law. In 2007, Fine Gael proposed a constitutional amendment to allow for the establishment of an entirely distinct and separate system of family courts. Family law cases are currently dealt with in the District, Circuit and High Courts. A dedicated family court system which would operate separately to the current civil and criminal court systems would offer those involved in family disputes a lower cost, less complex avenue to resolve their difficulties and problems. It would also help them to engage more with bodies which do very good work in the area of family law, namely, family support agencies and family mediation services, and with the concept of alternative dispute resolution and mediation in particular.

Our current system of family courts is fragmented, having developed piecemeal over many years in an unplanned, haphazard way. Many experts contend, and I agree with them, that a lack of specialist judicial training and a lack of transparency in findings in the family law area often results in inconsistent decisions being delivered. It is two years since the distinguished legal affairs correspondent, Carol Coulter, published an important report on this area and 13 years since the Law Reform Commission published a detailed report calling for reform in this area. The inaction on the part of Government on this matter is less than acceptable. Drawing from my experience of family law matters as a practitioner in provincial Ireland, there is a real need for an initiative in the family law courts, perhaps similar to the one we are now approving for the criminal courts.

In his speech on Bill, the Minister spoke of a greater level of co-ordination and administrative efficiencies and he is correct. I welcome the move towards administrative efficiencies in respect of court offices by the creation of a consolidated court office and this brings me conveniently to the McCarthy report. We have heard a procession of Ministers distance themselves from the McCarthy report as though they had nothing to do with its commission and that it came as a bolt from the blue. I have not heard anything from the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform to date. That is not to state he has not been speaking about it but-----

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