Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

I accept this legislation is required. However, I am not an advocate for rushing legislation through this House. Although this is probably an exception, we tend to see this prior to a recess. I hope we are not going to see a whole clatter of things rushed through without adequate scrutiny.

The primary legislation should have made provision for court presenters when the strategy was being developed. It should not have taken a High Court decision to force the justice system to harmonise itself with some basic considerations. I wonder what consideration there was at the point the strategy was being developed. Did nobody in the Department think of this aspect? It may be there are other Bills where we should learn from this shortcoming.

A point I would like to build on is the context of human rights. The court management office and the court presenters must be cognisant of the position relating to Articles 6 and 13 of the European Convention on Human Rights, in summary, the right to a fair and public hearing within a reasonable time. Others have talked, for example, about the number of judges. We are all aware there can be lengthy delays in cases being heard. If there is any violation of the convention in that regard, the person impacted can seek effective remedy before a national authority, notwithstanding that the violation has been committed by persons acting in an official capacity.

I know cases are being adjourned because the High Court decision means the Garda sergeant court presenters may no longer manage criminal prosecutions in the District Court. Ms Justice Bolger’s overturning of the rule under which a large volume of criminal prosecutions were presented by gardaí unconnected to the original investigation could seriously impact the current efficiencies realised by the use of the court presenters and the functioning of the District Court itself. This has the potential to lead to breaches of the convention because of delays but the specialised role of the court presenter could also be redundant, meaning gardaí who would be free to cover ground on their rosters will now find themselves coming back and forth to the courts. We have seen this before. I remember going past Naas courthouse maybe ten years ago and I would see a whole lot of gardaí outside the court and, at the same time, people were looking for visibility in other respects. It is very important that there is efficient use of gardaí.

I keep on stating that there is not equality across the country in the deployment of resources. The more the population grows, the more we stretch those resources, rather than having them added to. That is very much the case in places such as counties Kildare and Meath, which have the lowest ratio of population to gardaí. I suspect that when the new census of population comes out, this will be even more acute.

I want to move on to points raised by the Commission on the Future of Policing in Ireland. The 2018 Commission on the Future of Policing in Ireland report recommended that the new State Prosecution Service should be tasked with bringing cases to the Courts Service. The report also views Garda investigations and prosecutions as two separate jobs, as is the case in other comparable jurisdictions. The report goes further and calls for the immediate cessation of police prosecutions in court because gardaí are not trained to the level of the opposing defence lawyer. During the High Court case, legal counsel for the DPP and the Garda argued that the revised interpretation of the District Court rules on the right to an audience would result in a fundamental overhaul of the court presenters system operating in the District Court, and that the involvement of gardaí in prosecutions and the time they spend in court or preparing for court is enormously wasteful for police resourcing and they should be deployed to core policing duties. It would be quite useful to do some sort of a calculation regarding the time involved. When we consider the resources and we then start taking out things like rosters over whatever number of days and people who are ill or on leave, and we start to look at the actual time available to police areas, the capacity is much less than we might think.

The transfer of court prosecutions to another State department or service has been called for by gardaí themselves, the Garda Inspectorate and the Policing Authority. The Government's implementation plan for the Commission on the Future of Policing in Ireland stated that a review of prosecution decisions would take place by September 2019 and would be implemented by the summer of 2021. Instead, in the summer of 2022, we find ourselves having to enshrine poor practice into law because this recommendation has not been acted on in four and a half years. The Minister of State might outline where he sees that going and what kind of timeframe we are talking about. The Department of Justice put out a tender only last March to research our procedural system and how it compares to other jurisdictions. To go beyond the research, is there a timeline in that regard? The tender document cites the recommendation by the commission and states that it is accepted in principle by the Government, subject to further evaluation, suggesting that this reform, widely acknowledged by all sides as necessary and committed to by this Government and the last, could be sidelined.

The high-level steering group on police reform has yet to make any recommendation to the Government on the prosecution system. The two interim reports submitted by the group to the Minister for Justice in 2021 have not been published yet. The Minister of State might tell us if it is intended to publish those and, if so, when. I ask him to clarify whether there are plans to act on the recommendations of the Commission on the Future of Policing in Ireland. Are court presenters a stopgap to getting to that point and, if so, will the Minister publish those reports and give us some sort of a timeline on that?

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