John Kelly (Labour) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State for taking this Adjournment debate regarding fines where people go into court and claim they received summonses in regard to fines they were not aware had been issued. It has been brought to my attention that this has happened on numerous occasions. The matter has been well aired in the media as well. I refer to reports of court cases where people receive a summons in the post which is the first time they realise that, somehow, they had been issued with a fine.

An easy way to solve the problem is to have all of those fines sent by registered post to the offenders. If it is a defence on behalf of the Government that all of these fines are sent out and that people receive them but then claim they never received them in order that the judge will be lenient, it is a fallacy. For the past three years I have dealt with medical card issues and I know the PCARS would almost claim that of the 50% of people who applied for medical cards, it either never received their application or never received supplementary information that was required. Therefore, it is safe to say that mistakes do happen and can happen within the An Post system. It can also be the case that people claim they never received the fine when in fact they did. The easy way to deal with the problem is to issue all of these fines using registered post.