Ivana Bacik (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome all those in the Gallery from SAFE Ireland, Women's Aid and other organisations which have been of great help to us in the interim. Much has happened since 4 July when the House last debated Committee Stage. I am delighted that discussion on this Stage of this important Bill has resumed. All of us want its passage through the Houses expedited.

I do not propose to spend a long time discussing the amendments given that the House discussed this group, amendments Nos. 3 to 6, inclusive, in the previous debate. I wish to address amendment No. 6, which is in my name. Without going back over our previous discussion, the purpose of the amendment is to provide for a list of criteria or factors which the court would be required to consider in the decision as to whether to grant an order.The reason we put forward this amendment, and indeed why others put forward similar amendments, was our real concern over inconsistency in the criteria currently used. As long ago as 1999 the Law Society advocated that there should be either detailed statutory guidance or a list of criteria to be considered by the courts in determining whether or not to grant protective orders. The Law Society expressed concern about inconsistency at that point and all of us with any experience of the courts would be conscious of this. Inconsistency, indeed, is tacitly accepted in the Government's own amendment No. 35, which goes some way to addressing the issue in my own amendment by providing for a requirement to give reasons. This provision is also in our own amendment No. 6 but our amendment goes further in providing for the specific criteria.

I will briefly say a bit more on this. Apart from what the Law Society has stated, we also know that there is a very high attrition rate between the number of interim barring orders granted, for example, and the number of actual barring orders. In 2015, for example, 77% of interim barring orders were granted but fewer than 33% of barring orders. Why is this? Again, the Law Society has expressed its concern. It is, they say, impossible for lawyers to advise clients on their current prospects of success. The only guidance here is the Supreme Court decision in O'B v. O'B in 1983, where Mr. Justice O'Higgins set, for the most part, a high threshold for the granting of a barring order and referred to the fact that it must be a case of serious, repetitive and continuing misconduct and not the "ordinary wear and tear of married life". No barring order was granted there. This contrasted with the dissent in that case of Mr. Justice Griffin which set out the detail of a case in which there had been evidence of cruelty and control. That case, then, set the bar very high.

All of us here are delighted to see from the new amendments put forward by the Government last week that there will now be an offence of coercive control. That recognises that this may be an issue and that it may indeed change the nature of the threshold that applicants have to pass so as to get an order from the courts. We maintain, however, that it is important that we have a detailed list of criteria set out in legislation to really guard against the inconsistencies that currently bedevil the system.

I also very much welcome the new amendment No. 47b which sets out the new aggravating factors where an assault offence is committed in an intimate and committed relationship. This is very welcome, and though it does not go quite as far as we would have wanted as compared to the specific domestic violence offence we had looked for, it goes quite a good deal of the way. I wonder if the Minister might agree in principle to look at introducing a list of statutory criteria for the courts. I have made the case strongly and we are all of us very concerned about this. We mean to press this matter because it really is a key principle.