Michael McNamara (Clare, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I will move the amendment. I would like to get on to the substance of it.

I welcome that the Minister will carry out a review but what is a review? If it is something that his Department will examine internally, I regret that I cannot have much confidence in that. We know what the Department thinks is necessary because the Minister put the motion before us, as he did last year and the year before that. What will the review consist of and who will carry it out? We have had reviews. The Hederman committee was established in 1999 and spent three years on this issues. A wide variety of stakeholders was invited to participate and it reported in 2002. Deputy Jim O'Callaghan stated earlier that it recommended that the courts continue as is. That is not correct, in my view. In 2002 the committee recommended to the Government that there should not be a category of offences that are automatically heard before the Special Criminal Court, and that this exceptional measure should be applied on a case-by-case basis.

The UN human rights committee has criticised Ireland for exactly the same thing. Deputy O’Callaghan alluded to the Hederman committee. There was also the fact that Mr. Justice Hederman himself - he was in fact a retired Supreme Court judge and a former Attorney General in former Taoiseach Jack Lynch’s Government and was not some sort of subversive renegade - along with Professors Dermot Walsh and William Binchy recommended that it be abolished entirely. They did not recommend that it be maintained as is. Ireland has been repeatedly criticised by domestic actors, the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, ICCL, the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission, and its predecessor led by the Minister’s former colleague and Senator, Maurice Manning, also criticised it. How much criticism do we need before we look seriously at this? A desktop review in the Minister’s Department is not something that I would have confidence in to deliver anything. I welcome the fact that the Minister has moved a small bit on this but we need more.

I will highlight a couple of issues. The Kavanagh case was taken where Ireland has signed up to the optional protocol in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, ICCPR, which enables a person who believes that their humans rights have been violated to make a complaint to the committee which could determine this matter. Mr. Kavanagh was successful because the committee found that it could see no lawful basis in accordance with Ireland’s international legal commitments for the fact that his case was heard in the manner it was. He was charged with scheduled offences and non-scheduled offences but the committee could see no basis that his case was heard by a non-jury trial. He went to the Supreme Court, which determined that Ireland’s international commitments are not binding on us domestically but binding on us internationally.

This year, in the teeth of a huge pandemic, when this country was stretched economically, fiscally and in terms of human resources, a great amount of energy was put towards getting onto the UN Security Council. I congratulate the Government, of which the Minister is a Member, for having successfully secured a seat on the Security Council. If the UN does not matter why did we bother? If the UN does matter are we going to listen to the UN, to the human rights committee and to the special rapporteurs? This occurs in every periodic report, it is not just a footnote in one, where we are criticised for this. The Hederman committee, the Irish Human Rights and Equality Committee and the ICCL all criticised it. Everybody, bar at the Minister’s own Department, criticises it. Who is going to review this?

What I am proposing is not revolutionary; we continue as is for seven months but after six months we ask for a report. Under the 1975 Act that established the Law Reform Commission, the Attorney General can request that a special report be done. It is not too much to ask that the Law Reform Commission at this stage look at the issue. Can one find a more impartial, neutral, learned body than the Law Reform Commission to do this?

If the Minister is going to suggest that it be another retired High Court or Supreme Court judge, that is great, but we have already had that. They have already made their recommendations and these have been ignored. I ask that the Minister announces something meaningful and not just that somebody, somewhere will review or take a look at it. That is not good enough any more, especially now we are on the UN Security Council. I agree with Deputy Pa Daly who discussed this, and I am conscious about not going over my time-----

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