Rónán Mullen (Independent) | Oireachtas source

Cuirim fáilte roimh an Aire. I also support this Bill and I agree with much of what Senator Ward just said. This Bill implements one of the many welcome recommendations of the O'Malley report published last August. However, I question why this one issue has been carved out of the report and introduced in a stand-alone Bill, and whether it would not have been better for more of the O'Malley proposals to be introduced in a more comprehensive Bill rather than in piecemeal fashion. Given the extremely constrained amount of Dáil and Seanad time we have at present, there might have been an argument for that. However, that is not to cavil at the welcome that this Bill deserves.

Pre-trial hearings are important. There is a certain irony here that the concept of pre-trial hearings is of great day-to-day familiarity to ordinary citizens, even if it is not the practice in our own courts. Pre-trial hearings feature in courtroom scenes in legal dramas such as "The Good Fight". They have entered Irish popular culture long before they have arrived in our legal system.

Of course, a courtroom drama is no way to judge the effectiveness of any set of procedures or reform, but it gives an accurate, even if simplistic, indication of how such hearings operate. The hearings can be used to weed out legal issues which might arise in a full trial, or in some cases prevent a trial from proceeding at all in a case which the process shows to be without merit, either for legal reasons or for want of evidence.Like so many good changes that have simplified our legal system, the proposal being dealt with today has been in the ether for a long time, at least 20 years at this point. Listening to Senator Ward I found myself wondering why it takes so long to do things that make such obvious sense.

The O'Malley report refers to two previous studies on the issue, namely the working group on the jurisdiction of the courts chaired by Mr. Justice Niall Fennelly in 2003, and the McDermott report in 2013. However, I also recall that there was another report by the Law Reform Commission in 2006, then chaired by Mr. Justice Hugh Geoghegan, which dealt with prosecution appeals and pre-trial hearings. This report contained an interesting examination of the pros and cons of pre-trial hearings, and looked at the experience in England and Wales. Ultimately, the Fennelly report found that the evidence in favour of pre-trial hearings was, in its words, "inconclusive" but it did recommend a study into the impact that voir direhas in practice on the ability of juries to fully appreciate the evidence before them. These are the proceedings that take place in trials conducted in the absence of the jury to determine matters that henceforth will be dealt with in pre-trial hearings. It is important that the concerns and caveats flagged by Mr. Justice Fennelly in 2006 are borne in mind when implementing pre-trial hearings.

The proposal is a win-win for everybody who will be involved. It will reduce the stress on victims and complainants by shortening trials and allowing difficult issues, such as questioning on sexual history, to be dealt with before the start of the trial proper. This reform will also be good for future jurors, because it will shorten trials and cut down on the amount of disruption in their lives through endless suspension of trials for voir dirediscussion.

I might say as an aside that jury selection is another area that needs to be addressed seriously in the years to come. The jury selection system is messy and chaotic, and that is putting it charitably. I would recommend, if she has not already done so, that the Minister read any of several interesting opinion pieces written by the barrister James McDermott on the topic. The Irish jury selection process and juror experience is stuck in the 19th century, often resembling something out of Dickens. It badly needs to be modernised.

Pre-trial hearings will also, hopefully, benefit the taxpayer, by shortening the length of trials, shortening court lists, and reducing costs. This reform will also vindicate and strengthen the rights of accused persons, by allowing issues to be ironed out at an early stage in a way that will not contaminate or prejudice the jury. In a society that values the rule of law we should never be ashamed of any measure that would vindicate the rights of an accused who, as Senator Ward has just said, is innocent until proved guilty. We should never apologise for being scrupulous about ensuring due process for the accused. Not all those put on trial for criminal offences are guilty. We should think of this especially in the fraught context of sexual offences, which frequently come up for discussion. It is for this reason that our Constitution guarantees a presumption of innocence and a right to silence. I was very glad that the O'Malley report rejected calls from various quarters that would effectively have eroded the presumption of innocence in trials of sexual offences.

I hope it goes without saying that the O'Malley report should not be the end of our review of the effectiveness of the criminal courts. We should constant looking for new ways to streamline the system and make it fairer for all those involved. The nature of criminal trials in Ireland, and indeed in any common-law system, is that trials are adversarial in nature. This is in contrast to the Continent, for example, where the civil law system has led countries to adopt a different, less adversarial and more probative, style of conducting trials.

I recently read some detail on the criminal process in operation in Belgium, where the trial process seems to be somewhat more free-flowing than the rigid and almost formulaic structure of criminal trials here. The thought struck me that perhaps there are some aspects of the continental system which we could learn from and adopt here, perhaps in a limited way. Within the confines of the constitutional framework for the trial of offences and the rights of the accused, there are surely reforms we could introduce nonetheless that would make the process of criminal trials more probative and less adversarial.A discussion of that would go well beyond the scope of this Bill, whose introduction I welcome and passage I intend to support.