Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister to the House. I indicate my support for the passage of this legislation. There is a point I often wondered about because it practically arose when I occupied the office the Minister now holds. I refer to the circumstances that obtain when a person is found not guilty by reason of insanity and ordered to be detained in the Central Mental Hospital. If such a person leaves the Central Mental Hospital, on escorted or unescorted day leave or otherwise, which is quite frequently the case, and absconds to a foreign jurisdiction, is there any method of getting him or her back? Is the individual effectively free because he or she has not been convicted and there is no sentence to be imposed? My memory of the problem, which arose when I was Minister, was twigged by paragraph (16) of Council Framework Decision 2008/947/JHA, which reads:

A Member State may refuse to recognise a judgment and, where applicable, a probation decision, if the judgment concerned was issued against a person who has not been found guilty, such as in the case of a mentally ill person, and the judgment or, where applicable, the probation decision provides for medical/therapeutic treatment which the executing State cannot supervise in respect of such persons under its national law.

If somebody charged with murder and acquitted on grounds of insanity is given day release from the Central Mental Hospital, escorted or unescorted, to visit family but absconds to Northern Ireland or somewhere else in the European Union, and has not been found guilty of an offence, the ordinary laws of such a place would not allow the person to be put into a corresponding mental institution. The individual would effectively be able to abscond and set at naught the Irish court's decision.

When I saw the echo in the recitals to the framework directive, I was struck by the fact that we should attempt, if at all possible, to arrange for a new measure - I believe framework decisions are a thing of the past - allowing for the rendition of such people back to the state they left, subject to whatever safeguards are necessary, much along the lines of the European arrest warrant. Without it, it seems there is a little bit of a hole in the system. On one occasion, of which I had knowledge as Minister, there was nothing we could do about it at all.