Ivana Bacik (Independent)

I welcome the opportunity to engage in a debate on this issue, in which I have a strong personal interest, having worked for years as practitioner in the criminal justice system and teaching criminal law in Trinity College. It is important that we do not engage in pantomime politics. Rather than being a Punch and Judy show, I was going to start by making some constructive comments and welcoming some of the things the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform has said and some things which have been implemented by the previous Government.

The Minister is right in that the Garda Ombudsman Commission has been a welcome development and the changes in the Garda Síochána Act have meant that important reforms have taken place in the Garda. That is not to say that there are not flaws in the system. At the time the Garda Ombudsman Commission was established I and others were very critical of the fact that it was to be a three-person commission rather than following the much stronger model of the one-person ombudsman, such as that held by Nuala O'Loan in Northern Ireland.

I also welcome the Minister's comments about retaining a balanced approach to the arming of gardaí. The current Garda review, which I believe we have all received, calls for a debate on the need to arm the members of the Garda Síochána. Most of us here would agree that the present situation, where we have an unarmed force with the ability to have some specialist armed members, is a better approach to policing and has served us well.

Having said that, I take issue with some of the accepted wisdom adopted by the Minister in his speech. First, the idea that the criminal justice legislation of 2006 and 2007 in any way represents an effective approach to dealing with the serious problem of gangland crime is misleading. I do not believe the changes brought about by that legislation will have the effect the Minister wishes them to have.

I believe, and I believe it is widely accepted, that these changes were brought in with undue haste and without time for adequate debate and sufficient consideration of how they would impact on due process and procedures in criminal trials. We have all seen in the past the serious problems that can occur when there is what may be termed a "conviction at all costs" culture within any policing system. In particular, we can think about the miscarriages of justice that occurred in Great Britain during the 1980s and those which occurred in recent years here. What is often overlooked is that when the innocent are wrongly convicted, the guilty go free, which is in nobody's interests, least of all those of victims of crime. We must be very careful about encroaching unduly on the due process rights of the accused.

We must also be careful about things like mandatory minimum sentences. There is no evidence that these are effective in reducing crime. The Judiciary has been heavily criticised by politicians on the Government side for failing to apply ten-year minimum sentences. However, the Judiciary was rightly given a discretion that where exceptional circumstances existed, those minimum sentences would not be applied.

The reality is that the big drug bosses are not the people who are likely to get these sentences. It is the smaller people, often addicts themselves, so-called drug mules and foreign nationals, as someone already mentioned, who are liable to be convicted. These are the people who are liable to get the ten-year sentences. What purpose does that serve in terms of rehabilitating offenders, stopping gangland killings and helping victims of crime?

We must also be clear that what assists in successful prosecutions is the——