Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I commend Senator Ó Céidigh on his initiative in bringing about this legislation and I very much welcome the supportive and co-operative approach of the Minister and his Department to the Senator's initiative. In the current climate, everyone is talking about personal injuries, fraud and all of that. Perjury is a wider issue than that. People can tell appalling lies in commercial and matrimonial cases and many other areas and do great damage to others, either personally or financially, or they may amass substantial gains for themselves by their behaviour. For instance, with whistleblower legislation, affidavits of discovery are very important in the judicial process. It keeps parties honest. I do not want to say anything overly dramatic but it is important that there are sanctions for telling lies on oath, not merely in court, but also in an affidavit that is going to influence the outcome of a court case. If a person has destroyed or falsified a document or affidavit of discovery, this can be of great importance.

The Minister has said that he has in excess of 100 pieces of legislation sitting on his desk. He has very graciously said that he does not want to reopen other things that have happened in this House today. Nobody is holding him up on this Bill or any of those other Bills. I emphasise that when it came to the Judicial Council Bill, this House was very facilitative in getting it through Committee Stage and on to Report Stage. That Bill is sorely needed, and I struggled for a number of years when I occupied the chair the Minister does now to get the Bill off the runway, so to speak, and airborne but with little success, due to factors that I will not go into now. We need a judicial council and this House is not, as it has been portrayed by some, holding up the Minister's programme. This House may have a view on one Bill, but nobody is stopping him from progressing everything else.

In a genuinely warm way I am delighted that the Minister is prepared to consider making Government time in this House available for Report Stage and that he has such a positive approach to the amendments which Senator Ó Céidigh has drafted to make this Bill as good as it possibly can be, so that when it is passed by this House, and I hope that is soon, it can go to the other House as a Bill which the Government can adopt completely in that House and pass into law as quickly as possible.

There are many who are prepared to perjure themselves in court. As long as the Director of Public Prosecutions takes the view that a statutory basis for perjury prosecutions must be put in place, the old thing that the Minister and I probably have heard on many occasions in court, where it is said that a file is going to have to be sent to Director of Public Prosecutions, will remain a very idle threat for people who have committed perjury because of the difficulties in proving the case and in stating exactly what perjury means.

The oaths Act needs to be looked at too. At the moment, if someone opts to affirm rather than swear, the judge is obliged - some judges forget about this - to put statutory questions to the witness and to ask him or her whether his or her unwillingness to swear is based on the absence of religious belief or the presence of religious belief which prohibits that witness from swearing.It is an embarrassing process for witnesses to have to go into their religious beliefs in court when it is not necessary. If evidence on affirmation is treated in exactly the same way as proposed in this legislation, which is to say in the same way as evidence on oath, it is not really necessary to grill people about their views on religious matters and to put them through that mill. I will leave it at that. I thank Senator Ó Céidigh and I thank the Minister for expediting the passage of this legislation.