Seán Sherlock (Cork East, Labour) | Oireachtas source

Notwithstanding the points that I am making about the passing of legislation in this House - the Minister I am sure will be embarrassed by the fact that his Government is standing over the Judicial Appointments Commission Bill 2017, which is a joke and a legislative farce - I still believe that because we are in a democracy, we in this House have the right to give a hearing to Deputy O'Callaghan and his party in respect of legislation that comes before us.

We are fully entitled to allow the Bill to proceed to another Stage even though we might have reservations about it. That is the fundamental point I am making.

I refer again to the submission of the IPRT. I have made the point on electronic tagging about which we have questions. I support the Minister's point on the Bill's constitutionality. This is supported in the submission by the IPRT. We have to be cautious about how we legislate for these matters in this House. I stood before the Ceann Comhairle to support the O'Farrell family. There was a litany of abuses and failures of the system in that case, but that should not mean we should legislate in haste and repent thereafter if there is a risk the legislation might be overturned. That serves nobody and it does not do anybody any good in dealing with the issues at hand.

I have a question about the explanatory memorandum, which I hope Deputy Jim O’Callaghan can address, and the statement that 13% of all crimes being committed by people out on bail. In how many cases was bail opposed? If we are going to interrogate the metrics we need to know in how many of the 13%, bail was opposed.

I have no qualms about supporting the passing of this legislation to the next Stage, but there is a lot of work to be done on Committee Stage. There is an issue as to whether the Bill is constitutional, and on Committee Stage we will soon find out whether that is the case. There are more than 200 Private Members' Bills, as I understand it, and we as individual Members have to check the Executive authority of the House. For too long the Executive ruled the roost and it is no harm the balance has shifted back towards the ordinary Members of the House.

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