James Browne (Wexford, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I am pleased to bring the Criminal Justice (Engagement of Children in Criminal Activity) Bill 2023 before the Seanad today.

This Bill addresses a very specific issue: to recognise and make punishable in law the harm caused to children by drawing them into a life of crime. Two programme for Government commitments are being delivered through this Bill. The first is to legislate against the coercion and use of minors in the sale and supply of drugs and, second, to criminalise adults who groom children to commit crimes.

This new legislation will outlaw the grooming of children into crime. For the first time, it will be an offence for an adult to compel, coerce, direct or deceive a child for the purpose of engaging in criminal activity, or for an adult to induce, invite, aid, abet, counsel or procure a child to engage in criminal activity. This is a particularly insidious harm with long-term consequences for the child victims, especially when it is carried out as part of a pattern over a sustained period of time, or by a trusted person within a child’s circle.

The existing law provides that an adult who uses a child to commit a crime can be punished for that crime. It does not address the separate and, arguably, more significant harm that is done to the child by grooming them into criminal activity. The law has never before recognised that there are two distinct aspects to this type of crime namely the visible crime against the victim, as well as the very grave wrong against the child.

The new grooming offences created by this Bill do not replicate or duplicate any existing offences, and no provisions in law are being repealed or amended. The new offences are in addition to the existing law. The Attorney General has advised that any overlap with section 7(1) of the Criminal Law 1997, on incitement to commit offences, does not prevent or harm the proper functioning of either.

At this point, | want to acknowledge the efforts made in the past to introduce legislation to tackle this issue. My colleague, Minister of State, Deputy Anne Rabbitte, introduced a Private Members' Bill in the Dáil along similar lines to this Bill in 2018. Two other Private Members' Bills were introduced in the meantime, directed at the specific issue of children being used in drug-related crime, for example, to transport or hold drugs on behalf of adult criminals. Similar legislation was enacted in 2017 in the State of Victoria, Australia, which made it an offence for an adult over the age of 21 to knowingly recruit a child to engage in any criminal activity punishable with a term of imprisonment of five years or more. Professor Geoffrey Shannon was the Special Rapporteur on Child Protection at the time. He recommended that Ireland should introduce similar provisions. This Bill does more to protect children from being groomed into criminal activity than either the earlier Private Members’ Bills or the Australian legislation. It will be a criminal offence to engage a child in any type of criminal activity, including but, importantly, not limited to crimes related to illegal drugs use. This low threshold has been deliberately selected to facilitate intervention before a pattern of offending can develop to the point where more serious offences are being committed and significant harm is done to the child.

lf we had adopted the approach in the Australian legislation, of setting the threshold at offences carrying a sentence of five years or more, only the most serious criminal activities would be captured by the Bill and more serious offending would have to occur for the legislation to take effect. In line with the lower threshold, the sentence is being set at five years rather than ten years as it is in Australian law.

Where a more serious offence is committed, An Garda Síochána and the DPP will still be able to use the existing provisions in law that allow them to charge the adult with the crime committed by the child, so an appropriate level of sanction will always be available. Where a child is found to have committed an offence, the appropriate criminal justice response is different than it would be if they were adults. Section 96 of the Children Act 2001 sets out the principles to be followed in the administration of justice for child offenders. A key feature is that detention is the option of last resort. In line with this principle, children are being deliberately excluded from liability for the grooming offences under this Bill in order to avoid causing any further harm to children who are likely to already be victims of grooming themselves, and to ensure that the adults who actually control the criminal activity are the ones targeted by the provisions.

As the Senators here will no doubt be well aware, the final Report of the Citizens' Assembly on Drugs was launched on Thursday last, 25 January. Among other things, the citizens' assembly looked at the lived experience of young people and adults affected by drugs use, as well as their families and communities. The assembly's chairperson called out the grooming and coercion of vulnerable young people into drug-related criminal activity in his foreword to the assembly’s report. This Bill will directly address this issue by targeting those who use their influence over children to commit offences, including drug-related crime.

This Bill has been developed alongside other non-legislative measures to address child criminality, notably, the Greentown programme and additional support for youth diversion projects in their work with the Garda youth diversion programme. The Minister for Justice and I were pleased to announce last week a three-year extension to the Greentown programme so that lessons learned can be formalised and disseminated to the entire network of youth justice initiatives.

The team who manage the Greentown programme has expressed support for this Bill and particularly for the strong message that it will send out to communities that grooming children into crime is not acceptable. The Greentown programme is led by the University of Limerick with the support of my Department, and the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth.

Over the last two years, the programme has been trialling new interventions in two local areas aiming to reduce and disrupt the influence of criminal networks on children. This innovative project was recognised at the 2020 European Crime Prevention Awards and provides insights into how criminal networks attract and confine children, encouraging and coercing them to become involved in serious crime and limiting their opportunities to escape their influence. This valuable work has shown that children are being involved in criminal activity by adults in criminal networks across the State. Some of these networks are kinship-based, which means that some children are being groomed in this way by people in their own family circles.

The Greentown programme has also shown that in the majority of cases where children are not related to gang leaders the adults doing this are aged between 19 and 23 years old. At this age, and in these settings, it is likely that some of these younger adults are also victims of grooming and they are perpetuating the cycle of harm.

The Department is currently consulting with key stakeholders in youth diversion on proposals to expand the Garda youth diversion programme to include this cohort of younger adults, in order to assess the programme’s effectiveness in avoiding unnecessary criminalisation of those whose offences are at the lower end of the scale. A key support to the diversion programme is the national network of over 100 youth diversion projects. These projects provide an invaluable support to complement the work of An Garda Síochána in addressing youth crime and protecting local communities.The projects work with an average of 3,500 to 4,000 young people aged 12 to 17 years of age across the State every year. The Government has allocated additional funding over the past two years to ensure nationwide coverage of the projects for the first time and, in budget 2024, the overall funding allocated to youth justice services increased by 10% to €33 million.

Enactment of this Bill will send a strong message to those people in our society who groom children into criminality that it is not acceptable to harm children in this way and that we are equipping our authorities with the tools needed to intervene to deal with the problem. It sends a strong message to communities that grooming children into criminal activity is not acceptable and, also, that it can be tackled. It will also give a mandate to An Garda Síochána to intervene and to take appropriate actions at local level, thereby reducing the harm being done to children in these circumstances and reducing the likelihood of offences being committed in the first place.

I look forward to the Senators' contributions in the course of this debate and I commend the Bill to the House.