David Norris (Independent)

I welcome the Minister of State. Like many preceding speakers, I am an amateur and do not have legal qualifications. Unfortunately, I missed the contribution by my colleague, Senator Bacik, who has an astute, professional view on these matters. However, I have some comments to make.

I will comment first on the Minister of State's speech and then on a short briefing I got from the Irish Human Rights Commission. This Bill comes, I presume, in the context of various murders, in particular gangland murders and drug related offences. This area is a huge industry. It is astonishing these offences take place so flagrantly and blatantly. People even boast about their involvement in these matters, at least by implication, on sites like Facebook. Some notorious criminals and their molls in Limerick have put material up on Facebook boasting about "my favourite gun" in the aftermath of a murder. This is an affront to civilised, decent society.

There has been a notable, changing, sophisticated pattern of the use of electronic information in murder trials over recent years, for example, the use of mobile phone patterns where signals are picked up from one centre to another. However, whereas the pattern of movement of a suspect can be placed before the court as evidence, I have yet to learn of a situation where the substance of a conversation has been placed before the court. This means we have a situation where the police may know a crime has been or is about to be committed, but is paralysed in terms of bringing the evidence before the court. Therefore, I welcome the development that will allow this to happen. We must be careful however, because we are talking here about secret surveillance. Any involvement by the State in spying, which is what it is, on individual citizens must be examined carefully in case of what the American military would call "friendly fire". We do not want decent citizens or people involved in minor infringements to be involved in this area.

The Minister of State said in his speech, "Both Bunreacht na hÉireann and the European Convention on Human Rights guarantee an accused person's right to a fair trial." That is only right. However, I noticed he did not refer to privacy. I would think that an important element. We have an obligation in international law to respect the privacy of the citizen except in rare and circumscribed circumstances. The privacy of third parties has not been raised in this debate so far. The police may be able to listen in to conversations and to sit some distance away and use electronic instruments to penetrate into a person's home, but while there may well be a criminal present, there may also be a perfectly innocent third party present whose activities should not be of interest to the police. In cases where the news media also have access, an innocent person could be dragged unwittingly into the situation. I ask the Minister of State to consider the rights of innocent third parties who may, willy-nilly, have become involved in a criminal situation.

I am glad Senator Walsh raised the matter of an arrestable offence because this is something I marked as needing further consideration. There seems to be a fairly low threshold for this and there are a myriad of arrestable offences.