Cathal Crowe (Clare, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State for bringing the Bill before the Dáil. It is very important legislation which brings a legal remedy to the McFarlane v. Ireland case before the European Court of Human Rights, and puts us back in line, because we were in breach of Article 6 of the European Convention of Human Rights. Essentially, the legislation brings in a compensatory factor for people who have had their right to a fair hearing delayed beyond an acceptable time period both in criminal cases and in other matters. It is a positive development.

I note the Bill also provides for the appointment of a chief courts delay assessor, who will assess applications where delays have been deemed to have happened. It is important that while this legislation progresses, there is a grasping of the nettle in terms of other issues relating to the courts. Shortly, I will be a witness in a criminal case, and I look forward to playing my role in that. I have no more to say on the matter. It will play out in its own time. Every citizen of this land should play his or her part when called to. I will be a witness in a case very soon, and I hope that case will be heard as quickly as possible.

I want to raise a few points. It galls a lot of people when they see, repeatedly, on television that certain individuals have been through the courts system and the reporter will say that this person has a few dozen convictions already and they are being represented in the Central Criminal Court with legal aid. I understand that in some jurisdictions there is a cap on free legal aid. In Italy and Greece it does not exist at all. In some countries like the UK, there is a very generous system. I know that some will come out time and again and say that everyone has the right to be assumed to be innocent until proven guilty. Of course, that is a fact that is enshrined in Irish law. However, it makes a bit of mockery not of the courts system, but of the taxpayer to see the same boyos going in time and again and having a very hefty costing defence put up by the Irish taxpayer. After so many occasions, people should have to stand on their own two feet and cobble together their own defence in whatever fashion they can. I know the Minister of State has all the legal training. I am a teacher by profession. I am just telling the Minister of State how people feel. I have been in courts a number of times over the years, thankfully on the right side of the law. It galls people when they see the lads coming in, getting their representation and going out again. They do not have much mass or respect for the courts system. That, too, needs to be looked at in time.

The resourcing of the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions needs to be looked at. It was flagged in late March as being a reason many court cases are not progressing sufficiently. I have friends in An Garda Síochána, as I am sure most Members here do. They find it extremely frustrating that they invest a huge amount of time investigating a crime, capturing the culprit and bringing the case through all the processes they have to complete, including bringing it to the DPP, only to see the culprit being given a very light rap on the knuckles or something afterwards. It can be quite demoralising to an investigating garda, and very time consuming. Delays in courts do not help in that regard.

I have a note here, which is a wry comment. It is not so much for the Minister of State, but maybe there should be something like this Bill for An Bord Pleanála. Perhaps it would get things moving at that end if there was some kind of a penalty or a clawback provided for in the case of inordinate delays.

I wish to highlight that there has been a perception for some time that the law in Ireland is a little bit soft. It is not the Minister of State's fault, and it is certainly not the fault of the Garda. I sometimes hear that from gardaí. There are two pieces of legislation which at times make it quite difficult for members of the Garda to carry out their functions and duties, the Children Act 2001 and the Criminal Justice Act 2006. They set out how an adolescent, a teenager or a minor should be treated in the legal system.

It is very important that we have child protection laws. When I was a teacher, we had a litany of legislation and circulars from the Department on the pinboard behind our desk that gave full protection to children, and rightly so. However, gardaí find it very difficult when they are policing at weekends and there is antisocial behaviour. Most of the time, the very most they can ask is for people to move on, which is a legal direction. If a group of people is causing mayhem - I will not even get into examples because we can all give them - and they move to the next street corner, they will have complied with that order. It just seems rather weak. It seems that some of the laws I quoted trump and exceed other ones and, therefore, gardaí feel pretty powerless at times when they are out trying to deal with these incidents.

The last point I wish to make, which is important to this debate, is that prison teachers appeared before the Joint Committee on Education, Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science quite recently and cited the fact that there are fabulous programmes going on in prisons, and rightly so. It should not be about tough times; there should be an educational aspect to it. However, they have no metric of how many people with learning difficulties are in the Irish prison system at the moment, which there is in other jurisdictions. It is as high as 60% or 550,000 people in the US penal system. We do not have such measurement at all. It bothers me, particularly as an educator where we are very focused on diagnostics. We very much want to know what challenges a child or adolescent faces and we want to look at therapeutic interventions. When someone is an adult, however, we do not really follow the diagnostic path. When someone is in the Prison Service, particularly if a prisoner is availing of in-prison educational facilities, there should be some form of child and adolescent mental health services, CAMHS, although we cannot call it CAMHS because it is dealing with adults. However, there should be some form of diagnostics so that when someone is availing of education, even if they have entered into adulthood at that point, we can look at their case and say that person endured the following in his or her lifetime. It is very important to know the someone's psychology to see how we can go about assisting them with therapeutic interventions.

The backbone of the Bill is very solid. I support it fully as do those in government. It brings us back in line with the European Court of Human Rights and the breach in the McFarlane case.

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