Ivana Bacik (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister, Deputy Fitzgerald, to the House. This is our first opportunity to welcome her here as Minister for Justice and Equality. We are all delighted that she has the portfolio, particularly me having worked with her in this House under the previous Government. I very much look forward to working with her in the future.

I have already paid tribute to her predecessor, Deputy Shatter, who brought through much reforming legislation and initiated much of it in this House. I very much hope and expect that the new Minister will continue in a reforming vein and will also initiate in this House Bills from the Department of Justice and Equality. We have had some very good debates and good Committee Stage debates, particularly on justice Bills, in this House since 2011 and I hope that we will continue to do so.

The Minister is very welcome, and the Bill is also very welcome. It is long overdue, as others have pointed out, and it has been widely welcomed generally. Others, along with the Minister, have spoken about the genesis of the Bill. It was developed from Law Reform Commission recommendations and is, in effect, a redraft of the Bill introduced in 2010. It is a greatly improved redraft, and this has been acknowledged widely, particularly by the Irish Human Rights Commission. Others referred to the commission's most recent observations on this Bill, which were produced in March 2014, in which it pointed out that many of its recommendations on the 2010 version of the Bill have been incorporated into this Bill. The Irish Human Rights Commission, very importantly, acknowledged the significance of the amendments made, particularly in respect of Part 10 regarding the destruction of samples and the removal of profiles.

The Minister's predecessor commented, when he introduced this Bill, that the really significant change was that the presumption is now in favour of the destruction of samples and profiles where previously it was in favour of retention, and that the onus has shifted from the person from whom samples were taken to the Commissioner in some instances. That is a very important improvement which we all welcome.

We also acknowledge the difficulty in achieving a proportionate balance between the rights of the person who is the source of a DNA profile or the subject from whom samples are taken, their rights to bodily integrity, as Senator O'Donovan has said, and to privacy, as against the wider public interest in preventing crime and in detecting and investigating offences. We acknowledge the difficulty in achieving that balance and also the fact we are doing it in the context of international law and Court of Human Rights judgments, notably the Marper judgment of 2008, to which the Minister referred. We must be mindful of all those factors.

Happily for us, other jurisdictions have moved to legislate before now. The British database has been in place since the mid-1990s. This is something we need to have in place. We need a statutory framework for the Forensic Science Laboratory. I know that Dr. Sheila Willis and other staff from the laboratory are present in the Chamber. The laboratory is going to be renamed Forensic Science Ireland. I acknowledge the great work the forensic scientists have done and will continue to do in the service of the State. They will be very much facilitated in their work with this new statutory framework that they and many of us in the criminal justice system have sought for some time. It is very important to have a framework in place.

I want to look a little more at some of the provisions that are particularly welcome and to comment on some on which we wish to review further. Senator Conway referred to the welcome the Irish Human Rights Commission gave to the framework. It is fair to say that it also suggested some changes it felt would improve the Bill even further while acknowledging the changes that have been made, both since 2010 and on Committee Stage in the other House, where a number of changes were made. The commission made other recommendations it would like to see in place and we can discuss them further on Committee Stage in this House.

The complex structure of the Bill is inevitable given the very many different scenarios the legislation tackles. Trying to get an overview of it from a practitioner point of view, it is important to say that Parts 2 and 4 will be of huge practical significance to members of An Garda Síochána and criminal justice practitioners. Part 2 relates to the taking of samples from a person in custody in Garda stations, which refers to anyone who goes into custody from the commencement of the Bill. Part 4 refers to samples from offenders for the reference index of the DNA database system. That refers to people who may already be serving sentences in prison or who have been convicted.

Those are two particularly important Parts, and we must ensure intense scrutiny of the balanced reached in those provisions, particularly sections 11 to 13, inclusive, and sections 31 and 32 relating to the taking of samples.

There are also very different scenarios where samples are taken. Part 3 provides for the taking of samples from volunteers to generate DNA profiles, with the provision on mass screening in section 29. That is one area the Human Rights Commission has pointed out the implementation of which section must be scrutinised carefully to ensure, for example, that it is not used for racial profiling. We all would be mindful of the need to ensure safeguards there.

Part 5 refers to a specific and different scenario, the taking of samples for elimination purposes, largely from members of An Garda Síochána to ensure that they can be excluded from suspects at a crime scene. In Part 6, there is an important provision of samples for identification purposes for the DNA database relating to missing persons, etc., which is also a different sort of scenario.

The other Parts relate to how the taking of samples are carried out. I welcome the fact that in Part 7 there are such specific provisions relating to the taking of samples from protected persons and children. I also particularly welcome the provisions in Part 9 on the introduction of an independent DNA oversight committee to be chaired by a judge and which will have the duty of laying annual reports before the Oireachtas. On the justice side, we are already in the practice of hearing from the Minister for Justice and Equality, with the annual reports on the implementation of the provisions of the Offences Against the State Acts. Those reports are always useful because in them we get data as to how many times each provision of the Offences Against the State Acts has been used. I hope we will see that level of detail in the annual reports laid before the Oireachtas from this independent oversight committee. I note one recommendation from the Human Rights Commission which is that the committee would include one member with human rights expertise. One would expect a judge would have that to start with, but it may be that it would be worth looking at some specific provision for that.

Part 10 is hugely significant. This is where, as the Minister stated, the significant changes were made compared to the 2010 Bill. I note that in respect of Part 10 the Human Rights Commission has made few recommendations. I welcome the provisions for review of the time periods for which profiles may be retained because there was concern of the length of time. On the idea of six years and three years, there were questions raised. I spoke with colleagues when the Bill was first introduced and there was a question as to why were the periods this long and should the Commissioner have to seek permission of the court to retain samples, particularly where a person is not convicted. These are some of the questions asked. I understand the review provisions deal with that. It is good to see that section 96 provides, as the Minister stated, for downward review only. The Minister is tasked with looking at the different retention periods, but only with a view to reviewing them downward rather than upward.