Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I do not wish to add very much to what the Minister has said. I thank her for her contribution and appreciate that she went to the Cabinet and got leave to support this legislation on terms, so to speak, that the Cabinet understood. However, I ask the Minister not to write that in stone either because there are issues to be teased out.I will give the Minister an example. If there were a homicide within a family where a father killed one child and another child is a witness to that, it cannot be the case that the mother cannot name the child because her other child was a witness who was on the record as having seen what happened. I am simply saying we cannot use a sledgehammer to crack that particular nut. If we want to afford anonymity to the sibling witness, so be it but it cannot be the case that the only way to do that is to make the child victim unidentifiable forever. I am just making that point. I fully accept the Government is concerned to achieve the best possible outcome but it does occur to me that there are subtleties here which would, in all probability, have us all back here in another 12 months. We have had cases where there have been child witnesses to their siblings being killed or gave important evidence in the trial. We cannot have a situation where the identity of the deceased in those particular crimes can never be disclosed because the incidental consequence would be that a child witness who was not the victim of a crime in any sense but just saw what happened would be identified.

I am just throwing that out as an example. It is not an inconceivable one and the Court of Appeal would apply the same kind of strict interpretive criteria to whatever we produce in this House now as it did to the last effort. Let us be very careful about what we actually achieve. I am not precious at all. If there are faults in what I have put forward, so be it. I fully appreciate the point the Minister made about not requiring the media to constantly have a team of counsel down in court to ask for permission to do fairly obvious things. We must have a law which is presumed to go one way unless the court goes the other way and there must be a presumption in favour of publicity rather than against it.

On whether this should apply retrospectively, I do not want to tear up that Court of Appeal decision. However, I do not want a situation where, for instance, in a specific case in west Dublin, the parents of the child in question become prohibited from ever mentioning that case again because we are not affording retrospection. This is fraught with difficulty and we must be very subtle in our approach to it to ensure we arrive at the correct result.

Having said those few words, I thank all the Members of the House who contributed to the debate. I thank the Minister and the Government for adopting the course they have. I again thank Deputy O’Callaghan for his co-operation on the matter and the Minister’s officials for their co-operation. I am anxious that we get on with Committee Stage as soon as the drafting is done. I ask the Minister not to close her mind now to amendments at that stage because we must tweak this to get it absolutely right.