Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

Sometimes I wonder what planet I am on when I come in here. Deputy Howlin referred to very unusual legislation. Much of it is. Maybe it is because we are in unusual times. I have just thought of a name for this Bill: the Donnelly Dictatorship Bill. If we were to give the powers to the Minister that he is asking for, without any checks and balances, then our mental health would be lost. When the Government refused to listen to NPHET's advice two weeks ago, the Minister, the Taoiseach and the Tánaiste all suddenly found a new, grave concern for the mental health of the population, the same mental health that has had its budgets cut and been ignored in policies for years. The Government found a new interest in mental health and now it must think that we are all mad that we might give it these powers without opposition and without pushing our amendments. The Government is asking us to give it carte blancheto attach fines and possibly jail sentences to a whole range of activities and we do we do not know what they are. The Minister needs to accept this amendment even just to save face; I will not vote for the Bill even if he does accept the amendment but I hear that others might.

I will make a broader point. I read today's briefing from the Department of the Taoiseach on Covid. It is an understatement to say that we are being treated like we are little kids who do not understand. It does not mention the collapse in tracing, the disaster we are facing in testing or the crazy stuff that happened with the Department of Agriculture Food and the Marine notifying the schools in time about the hand sanitiser that had been sent to them. It does not talk about the serious issues that we, as politicians, and the population have to grapple with to get ahead of the virus, it only talks about individual behaviour. It tells us to wash our hands again, to watch our distance again and to mask up again but where are the actual systemic measures that the Government needs to address as a matter of urgency? The Minister might think they are here in this Bill but we utterly disagree. I think An Garda Síochána probably disagrees as well. I listened to an interview with Drew Harris on the "News at One". Paul Reynolds of RTÉ did his best to extract from him how he feels about this legislation. The best Drew Harris could respond, because he cannot actually criticise the Government, was that as a good and faithful public servant, he would do what he was told. That is not a great endorsement of this legislation from the Garda Commissioner. In fact the whole mood of the interview was that he was not happy about it and I doubt many gardaí on the beat are happy either. It does not improve anything. If anything it sends out the message - optics are important - that ordinary people, families and people who try to socialise are to blame and that it is not to do with the Government's systemic failures, the failure to get ahead with tracking and tracing and to employ the additional 200 nurses needed in homes, the failure that where contracts are issued they are zero hours, and the failure when teachers and special needs assistants are taken out of schools when they are badly needed. I could go on and on about the many systemic failures that are not being addressed here.

Fines do not work. Back in 2016, the Minister, Frances Fitzgerald, introduced legislation to stop attaching jail sentences to fines. That was a progressive move. A report in The Irish Times late last year showed that since that legislation was introduced almost 32,000 failed to pay court imposed fines from 1 January to the end of November 2019. That figure was exponentially rising. The imposition of fines does not work. The Minister might say that attaching a jail sentence to them seemed to work but it did not and that is why we had to end it. There were jail cells full of lone parents, usually poor women, some coming from as far as Donegal or the bowels of Kerry to the Dóchas Centre or Limerick, being jailed because they did not pay their TV licence. That is why we ended that draconian practice which the Minister now wants to bring back into law, moving away from progressive legislation back to regressive legislation. More important is the signal this is sending to the people that they are the problem, not the health service being a disaster or the tracking and tracing that is falling apart and the domino effect that follows that but actually it is the ordinary Joe and Josephine Soap. It is not good enough and we will utterly oppose this.

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