Derek McDowell (Labour)

I thank all the Members of this House for the way in which they have carefully gone through the Bill, participating in a very constructive debate on Second, Committee and Report Stages. I thank individual Members for the amendments that were accepted, and for those that were not, which nevertheless were argued for with passion and in a constructive spirit.

This is a very extensive Bill of almost 200 sections. It is designed to make our criminal law more effective but it is not, as I said on Second Stage, the be all and end all of criminal legislation. There will be more in the fullness of time and further reforms may be necessary.

I am reasonably satisfied that all of the measures provided for in the Bill are proportionate and reasonable and will greatly assist members of the Garda Síochána in dealing with the new type of crime with which they are confronted. I refer in particular to the provisions on detention periods for investigations of serious offences and to those on firearms, which are of significant topicality. Other provisions relate to anti-social behaviour, the preservation of crime scenes and investigative procedures and there are general amendments to the criminal law which will be most valuable.

I echo what I said on Second Stage. We live in a very different world from the one in which most of our criminal law originated. I was impressed by a speech by the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, the other day. He said that, coming as he did from a legal family and being a barrister himself, he had regarded many things as immovable and unchangeable cornerstones of society. We now live in a world where we must revisit certain fundamental propositions. We live in a world in which it is not just hardened paramilitaries who stare at a point on a wall in a Garda station for 24 hours but 19 year old thugs and where significant efforts are made to destroy forensic evidence, such as by burning out cars and leaving the handguns used for murders in them.

We live in a world where people who should be willing to be witnesses, because they see with their own eyes murders committed, suddenly become cold for that purpose. We will have to recalibrate our law to deal effectively with such people. This Bill addresses that to some extent, though I do not suggest it will be easy to achieve the right balance for the next generation of reforms.

Criminal law is formal and painstaking and the requirement for proof beyond reasonable doubt is difficult but I take that as a given in a society subject to the rule of law. Equally, it is not a game of chess between lawyers. It is a life and death matter, the health of our society or its sickness are at stake. It is the difference between human rights being trampled down or not being trampled down.

The criminal justice system does not exist as the private game park for lawyers but as the possession of every citizen as a bulwark against the invasion of their rights by others. I do not endorse everything that Tony Blair has said or done. For example, we in this country are fortunate to have a constitutional obligation to allow trial by jury, which cannot just be set aside for the convenience of the Government. Likewise we have a constitutional guarantee of trial and the due course of law, in which the Judiciary is the ultimate decider of what does and does not amount to a fair trial, by reference to constitutionally guaranteed values. Having said that, in the next few years Ireland as a society will have to revisit some fairly fundamental propositions if we are to be able to stand up to the drug warlords, the people who damage our society and those for whom life has ceased to have any sanctity.

I conclude by thanking the Leader and other Members of this House for their co-operation with me and my officials in the passage of the Bill through the House. I wish to convey how hard my officials have worked on the Bill. They have worked at weekends and until the early hours of the morning on what has been by no means an easy task. The amount of work involved, even in preparing amendments to set aside the loophole identified the other day, was colossal. I pay tribute to those in the Office of the Parliamentary Counsel who worked on this legislation and legal advisers in the Office of the Attorney General who gave of their learning to ensure the Bill was as good as we could make it. Finally, I thank the Bills Office in the Houses of the Oireachtas for all the work it did to ensure that our intention as legislators was translated, as far as possible, into good law.