David Norris (Independent) | Oireachtas source

That is all very well but Attorneys General are frequently wrong. It would be much more important to take the advice of this House rather than the advice of an Attorney General who may well be wrong. On a maximum fine of €4,000 for defacing records, Garda records, which were a subject of contention between the British and Irish Government and between various individuals in this State and the Garda, regularly go missing. I feel strongly on this. The advice of the Attorney General should be taken into the balance, but I would ask the Minister to think again. This is no deterrent. If there is a situation, for example, involving financial irregularities, the kind of practice that went on during the banking crisis, does the Minister seriously think a €4,000 fine will deter anybody from covering up or destroying? I appeal to him to think again about this. I am sure the Attorney General is a tough enough bird to survive her advice being ignored for once. I feel strongly about this. I will call a vote on it. I beg the Minister to reconsider this and give some indication that he will think of it again.

This is a deliberate act. This is the destruction of records that are the property of the people. I spoke about privacy earlier and asked why make private communications available to the mass of the people. Now we have material that is the possession or birthright of the people being treated casually and its defacement and destruction regarded in so light a manner. I cannot understand this.

I cannot speculate on the reasons the Attorney General went through it. Maybe it is merely that she went through a list of penalties, but legislation is often out of date. In a previous session of Seanad Éireann, the former Minister of State, Mr. Martin Mansergh, when a Senator, introduced a rack of matters going back to the fact that it was a capital offence to omit the words "Crom abú", the Butlers' war cry, and we had immense fun with this kind of stuff. I would not say it is merely a matter of running a scan to see what was comparable. Can the Minister give any indication of comparable offences? I suppose it is an unfair question. In case he has any access to that information, what are the comparable offences? I would like to know them because I do not believe they are anything as consequential as this. This is a very serious matter. This is the deliberate destruction to avoid the exposure of certain information that may be detrimental to the career of somebody in the Civil Service. This is a most serious matter. I beg the Minister to reconsider.