Fintan Warfield (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State to the House. The Coroners (Amendment) Bill, will ensure that an appropriate number of coroners can be recruited to operate in the Dublin district and ensure that additional temporary coroners can be appointed to the Dublin district and other districts, if required.It is an urgent Bill to ensure the smooth running of the Coroner Service in dealing with personnel-related issues. The Bill will also ensure greater security of tenure for coroners in the Dublin district and transparency in regard to fees and expenses paid to coroners and the public. In addition to these in-house practical measures there is also a need for the Government to follow through on long-overdue reforms of the coroner system. The need for this reform has been highlighted by a good in-depth report by the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, ICCL, which was published a number of years ago by the Oireachtas committee and by many other calls for reform. After a long period of waiting for the necessary reforms to the coroner system, Sinn Féin would like to emphasise the point that we should not get caught up in a cycle of reports. Our justice spokespeople, Deputies Martin Kenny and Pa Daly, welcomed that ICCL report and the Oireachtas report and the many other calls for reform. Action is required now based on the various reports and calls. That action needs to be framed around certain ethical principles. Appointments should be on merit, standardised and led by the Public Appointments Service. Rules and the burden of proof to establish inquests should be standardised also. There are many aspects of the coroners system that are causing much anguish for families, in particular the long delays in toxicology results. That is the latest in a long list of difficulties.

It is important that the Government sets out how it intends to reform the coroner system and it needs to do so soon. It is also important that the Government's reform plan incorporates the recommendations from the report of the Oireachtas committee. These recommendations, if implemented, would improve the overall operation of the service. I will not go through them all but they include a new universal set of rules to inform the threshold necessary to reach a verdict in an inquest; a formal and organisational link between the registration of deaths and the electoral register and other public databases; an Office of the Chief Coroner and Deputy Coroner should be opened to assist the Coroner Service; a central Coroner Service should be established; jurors presiding at inquests should be formally selected; the coroner's service should be re-evaluated to ensure it is adequately funded; and an appeals system for verdicts by the coroner should be introduced. This package of reforms, among other reforms, should form the basis of the Government's plans to streamline and to make more effective the coroner system.

We support this Bill. We will submit an amendment aimed at holding the Government to account in regard to the reform of the wider service itself because families cannot wait any longer for that reform.