Michael McDowell (Dublin South East, Progressive Democrats)

I have a difficulty with this point. What the Senator is speaking of is a person, during a court case, exhibiting symptoms of mental disorder or illness which would enable the judge to convict and sentence that person on the basis that he or she was able to understand the trial because of his or her fitness to participate in the trial but that he would order that a portion of the sentence be served in a psychiatric institution. That would effectively give to the judge the role now carried out by the Irish Prison Service on advice: that a person convicted and committed to its care should be treated psychiatrically. Such a provision would give to a judge, other than in the context of guilt or innocence or fitness to participate in a trial, a new right to state that although a person was properly tried and convicted and should serve a prison sentence, he or she should serve such sentence in a psychiatric institution. That carries many implications with it, since it suggests that psychiatric institutions are substitute jails. Serving a prison sentence in a psychiatric institution could characterise such institutions as something that they are manifestly not, which is a place for the incarceration of guilty people as punishment. I am not happy with that mixture of punishment and treatment which lies at the heart of this amendment conceptually. Someone could be guilty and require to be punished but be punished by being sent to a psychiatric institution. I am not convinced that is a good idea.