Ivana Bacik (Labour) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister, Deputy McEntee, to the House and congratulate her on her appointment. It is my first opportunity to do so.To echo the words of previous speakers who spoke of the Bill as "technical", and I believe the Minister used that word himself, the Bill is primarily technical in nature. We have, however, seen some Bills purporting to be technical in nature rather rushed through this House that have created a great deal of controversy in recent weeks. So, I have heard those words with a somewhat dread feeling, which I am sure was shared by others also. This Bill, however, is genuinely a technical one and I am happy to support it on behalf of the Labour Party Senators.

Previous speakers have also referred to the fact that the Minister will bring the Bill forward only to Second Stage today and that we will have some time, which will be short no doubt, before Committee and Remaining Stages. That should not need to be said. It is exceptional that we would see Bills being rushed through this House on all Stages. Unfortunately, that exception has proven to be the norm in recent weeks over this term. I am glad that we are only dealing with Second Stage today, but it is partly because we have the Seanad Chamber today and therefore could not be dealing with Committee and Remaining Stages in any case. I note that the Minister will have amendments on the extraterritorial issue in section 6 coming forward on Committee Stage.

I disagree with the Senator who spoke about minimum mandatory sentences. They are not commonplace in Ireland's sentencing system and I do not believe they are a good idea. They do not have any evidence basis for their effectiveness and it is welcome that we have not moved towards minimum mandatory sentencing in general in our criminal justice system.

This is a somewhat technical Bill. I will not speak for very long on it. I am aware that it is before us with the purpose of transposing remaining provisions of the 2017 directive known as the PIF directive. I am grateful to the Oireachtas Library and Research Service for its usual excellent work in informing us about the background to the Bill, and for informing us that the name "PIF", which I had wondered about, is an acronym of the French for protection of financial interests.

The directive is about protecting the EU financial interests and therefore the provisions in this Bill are primarily amending the Criminal Justice (Theft and Fraud Offences) Act 2001, but doing so in order to create offences around fraud affecting the financial interest of the EU. Some aspects of the PIF directive have already been transposed into our law via the Criminal Justice (Corruption Offences) Act 2018, which replaced some provisions in Part 6 of the Criminal Justice (Theft and Fraud Offences) Act 2001.

My primary question for the Minister is why the 2018 Act did not transpose all of the relevant provisions of the directive. In other words, why is this Bill actually necessary? I am particularly interested to know the answer to that given that the transposition deadline for the PIF directive, a largely technical directive as we have heard, was 6 July 2019. This is not timely, it is actually overdue. We have already had legislation before the Houses that passed in 2018, which already has inserted some of the relevant provisions from the directive into the 2001 Act. I have a question about why we are only seeing this legislation now, especially given its relatively technical nature.

I have two more points to make. I note that the Bill amends the 2001 Act. The 2001 Act was itself a major piece of codifying and reforming legislation bringing together, as it did at the time 19 years ago, all of the pre-existing law on theft and updating it. I am certainly old enough to remember teaching my students about the Larceny Act 1916, and indeed defending before the courts on prosecutions under that Act. The 2001 Act was a very welcome piece of codifying legislation. Senator Ward referred to the need for consolidating legislation more generally, and made the point that this is the tenth version of amending legislation to the 2001 Act that has been before the Houses. We have excellent consolidating work going on with the Law Reform Commission and others, but we in the Oireachtas have a duty to ensure we are not engaging in piecemeal amendment over different pieces ofad hoclegislation. Again, my question is why we could not have had just one piece of legislation amending the Part 6 of the 2001 Act to transpose the directive. Why is there a need for two? Now we should really be looking at a more wholesale codification of the 2001 Act and its subsequent amendments to ensure we have a criminal theft code. Theft and fraud offences are not the only area, indeed they are not by any means the most problematic area, where we see this sort of piecemeal and ad hocreform and amendment. Sex offences law is a real area crying out for codification. Many of us have spoken on this many times. We need to see a proper codifying Act that brings together the vast array of these different offences, and especially sex offences against children, on which I did some work a few years ago.As a result, inconsistencies have arisen over the years and have been litigated before the courts in the context of the provisions of sentencing, etc., on those very serious offences. We could take a lead from companies law where we have very good consolidation in statute. That is a general call.

I note the Minister of State's comments about the European Public Prosecutor's Office, EPPO. Ireland is one of five members states which has not taken part in the EPPO system. We opted out of that under Protocol 21 along with four other states on the basis of concerns over our constitutional due process guarantee over our rules regarding admissibility of evidence and more generally because our common law system is different and has evolved differently from the civil law system pertaining in other member states. I absolutely support that. In previous justice committees I have supported us taking a different perspective on criminal law matters. Obviously, Ireland is not the only member state to do so.

However, there are aspects of the civil law system that we can learn from and can borrow from for our own criminal justice system. One of the is the idea of codifying criminal laws so that they are easily accessible and understandable. Consistency across different provisions is a very strong feature of European criminal justice systems. There is also the issue of the protection of victims' interests. While we have very strong due process laws which I strongly support, we can learn from other European systems in strengthening the role of the victim and enabling the victim to have a voice within the criminal justice system through the partie civilemethod and other mechanisms. We are changing and improving our system to take account of those good practice measures elsewhere. When we are debating legislation that is European criminal justice legislation, we should bear those points in mind.

I support the Bill and thank the Minister of State for coming to the House.