Thomas Pringle (Donegal, Independent) | Oireachtas source

As it is a 20-minute slot, I might run on a bit on the next day. I will get to bridge the two parts of the debate when we resume.

I am grateful for the opportunity to speak on the Policing, Security and Community Safety Bill 2023. I acknowledge the immense contribution of Dr. Vicky Conway in scrutinising the legislation. The Bill is better for it, and there is no doubt that her legacy will carry through in the context of the many incredible contributions she has made to Irish legislation and policing reform throughout her life. This legislation would be considerably stronger if her views had been taken on board entirely. That is a debate for another day, however.

The legislation will probably need to be revisited because it seems to be moving responsibility back to the Minister, which is a problem. Everything in recent years should have told us that we need a policing body that is completely independent of the political system. That is only right, and that is how it should be. We have seen so much political policing and so much happen in the context of all the controversies of recent years.

In the Donegal case, the political system was in a rush to ensure that it was seen as only affecting Donegal. In other words, that gardaí in Donegal were going mad and that Donegal was the only place where it was happening. Even though we knew it was going on all over the country, the political system wanted to ensure that it was contained in a small area in order to make it look as if that was all it was and that, only for it, everything would be grand.

We need to get away from that. We need to get away from the political masters. We need to get away from the idea that people might get their jobs because of political connections. Even if that does not happen, this legislation allows that perception to go out to the public. That is unfair to the people who got the jobs, but it is also unfair to the public. Even with the best will in the world, somebody might go on to be independent, but at the back of their mind they might be thinking, "The Minister decides whether I can stay in this job and maybe I don't want to piss him off too much because if I do that, they can call into question what I'm actually doing". That is wrong and nobody should do the job on that basis. If it deserves to be done, it deserves to be done right and should be done right regardless of the implications. The legislation needs to maintain and strengthen the independence of the role rather than bringing it back again into the political system, which is wrong.

I welcome the intention to introduce important policing reforms in line with the recommendations of the Commission on the Future of Policing in Ireland, which published its comprehensive report in September 2018. It is now 2023. Almost five years have passed and the legislation is only coming through now. It is disappointing that it has taken more than four years to publish legislation reflecting these recommendations, particularly when you consider that 2022 was the target date for implementing the recommendations. The Government had accepted within months of the report's publication in 2018 that it should be implemented, but then we delayed and dragged our heels. There may be genuine reasons for that, perhaps relating to the volume of legislation the Department needs to deal with and the fact that this is a long and detailed Bill, which means that it will be slower to implement. It has taken five years from when the report was published to the Bill coming before the House. That is a long time. It should not have taken so long.

The Bill is very ambitious and covers many different areas, including governance, oversight, complaints, harm reduction and community safety within its 270 pages. It is proposed to create a multilayered system of boards and agencies. It is hard to keep track of this while reading the legislation, never mind considering how having so many bodies with similar functions might work in practical terms. Just reading the Bill is confusing enough. I fear that the establishment of many different bodies may make it confusing, not only for the people dealing with An Garda Síochána but also for those working in An Garda Síochána. We should be simplifying the system rather than adding multiple different layers to it.

Good policing should focus on the quality not the quantity of its policing bodies. I wonder whether having multiple bodies with the same functions will be counterproductive in that when everyone is responsible, no one is.

One could be cynical and say it is the intention that we have loads of ideas of responsibility and the perception of responsibility, but we do not have any responsibility.

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