Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister to the House. I have no particularly strong views on this legislation in terms of finding any major fault with it. However, I think a couple of points should be made. First, Senator Paul Daly mentioned the question of empowering gardaí to arrest people without warrant for a breach of bail conditions. We should draw some comfort from the fact that it is necessary for a garda to do that and that he or she should consider it is necessary to arrest the person immediately to prevent harm to, interference with or intimidation of the person in respect of whom the offence is alleged to have been committed, a witness to the alleged offence, or any other person specified in a condition referred to in subparagraphs (5) and (6), or subsection (b) of section 1. It is not therefore a power of arrest which is general; it is quite narrow and, in fact, may be too narrow. It is narrowly confined to protecting life and limb, rather than simply arresting people who have breached the terms of a bail bond and have not turned up at a Garda station. It does not apply in those circumstances.

As regards the issue of electronic tagging, the Tánaiste has indicated that this is something which was already visited in 2007 when I was Tánaiste. At that time, I recall having fairly substantial misgivings about the practicality of it. As Senator Paul Daly pointed out, electronic tagging is an expensive operation. In the UK, in particular, it has proven to be quite expensive and controversial because of the expense involved. Nobody should think that it is some great cure-all in respect of the crime rate. As I recall, it was something that was then introduced into the legislation on a facilitative basis, but not with confidence that it would make a dramatic difference to the crime rate.

We should be conscious that every person who is denied bail is remanded in custody to a penal or custodial institution. In present circumstances, the result is that somebody else is released because we have got to the point of saturation in our jail system. Therefore, the question of denying people bail pending trial is one of which we must be conscious. It frequently results in somebody else having the punishment that is provided for by the courts cut back due to pressure of numbers.

I would like to say one thing, although it is probably not solely in the Tánaiste's bailiwick. It is nonetheless something which we have to get our heads around, namely, that bail in Ireland is fairly liberally available in the context of the presumption of innocence. That is fair enough and nobody would want to attack those concepts too heavily, as long as the bail law is reasonable. One thing that increasingly worries me, however, and which was a cause of concern to me as Minister for Justice, is the delay in the prosecution process which is huge and unjustifiable. It comes down to the presence of a different culture in Ireland whereby, because of our bail system, we tend to take a more relaxed view about getting on with cases. All of us feel anecdotally, looking at ITN, BBC or Sky News, that it feels strange to us that people are going to jail having been tried and convicted in the UK in a timeframe in which, in this jurisdiction, the criminal justice process would just be cranking up to deal with them.

The question of files going to the Director of Public Prosecutions, the investigative process generally, and the consideration of files that are sent to the DPP, seem to me to be dealt with in a far more leisurely way in this jurisdiction than abroad. I am not criticising anybody. This is not a party political point or even a political point, but it was something that concerned me ten years ago and still does now. There is a difference in approach in this jurisdiction which means that people who are prosecuted for serious crimes and granted bail, are frequently waiting two years before they have to face the adjudication of their offence, particularly for serious offences on indictment. That is not something we can live with forever. We should have a sense of urgency and determination to get court cases on early.

I also think that the criminal justice process is becoming elongated. When I started as a barrister, both defending and prosecuting, in the 1970s - it seems a long time ago now - cases were much shorter. Serious enough cases were dealt with in a day or two, whereas everything now seems to take a week. The amount of time the criminal justice system has allocated to the trial of offences has expanded. When I was Minister for Justice, I remember being concerned about that and setting up a group to rebalance the criminal law. It struck me then that the amount of protections, most of which were legitimate, we were putting in for the accused person in terms of access to documentation and evidence, put a huge strain on the prosecution process. Consequently, the prosecution of relatively small issues such as burglaries, has become a lengthy procedure.

I do not wish to talk too much about recent court cases, but the amount of issues that are dealt with in the absence of juries at great length seems to be growing all the time. Our criminal justice system is losing a sense of immediacy.

I suggest to the House and the Tánaiste that we will now have to look at one single issue, which is the delay in and complexity of the criminal justice process. It is getting so complex that it is becoming unwieldy. The result is that public confidence is being somewhat affected in the way in which criminal justice is administered.