All of us on the justice committee know this is a wide-ranging Bill. It is a fair reflection of how the Government is currently approaching the justice system. The Minister is often talked about in media circles as a Minister in a hurry. This Bill demonstrates that it is all hurry and very little pace because buried in these 33 sections are, admittedly, glimpses of what Ireland's judicial system could be - a country that treats survivors with dignity, with prisons that rehabilitate and that understands that housing, safety and justice are deeply connected - but what the Bill actually delivers does not come close to that standard. It is a timid, risk-averse version of reform. It shows a Government afraid to trust the evidence and the people who advance the evidence and afraid to be ambitious. The Bill represents a lot of things Ireland could be but clearly will not be under this Government. Before I turn to what is in the Bill, I will address what has been deliberately left out on this Stage. The general scheme of this legislation contained a proposal to explicitly grant An Garda Síochána the power to require people to remove face coverings in public. That provision is not in the Bill before us today. The Minister has confirmed it will instead be introduced later by way of Committee Stage amendment. That is deeply cynical. I read the last part of the Minister's speech in which he talked about wishing to do that in collaboration with those who potentially have an opposing or different view. I think I speak for those of us on the justice committee when I say that would be a first. For example, we looked at pepper spray in prisons. We clearly all have a different view from the one being advanced by the Minister but there has been no attempt to collaborate on that. The absence of the provision and how the Minister intends to approach face coverings could have been put into the Bill and we could have understood exactly what we will be seeking to amend, modify or argue against, or if the Minister had won the argument, that would be fair enough. That is what parliamentary debate is for. Its exclusion speaks to homework unfinished. If the Government believes it necessary and proportionate to change Garda powers, it should have been included in the Bill on publication and debated openly on Second Stage, where questions of principle clearly belong. Removing it now, only to insert it later on Committee Stage, ensures less time, less visibility and less scrutiny of a significant expansion of policing powers. An Garda SÍochána already has extensive powers under the Criminal Justice (Public Order) Act 1994 to deal with threatening, intimidating and abusive behaviour. That analysis is shared by the Bar Council. The question is not whether gardaí need this tool but whether the new powers are necessary, proportionate and legally sound and we should be able to debate the Minister's proposal on this Stage. Let me turn to pepper sprays in prisons. I think my view is echoed by all members of the justice committee that this is one of the most dangerous provisions in this legislation. The proposal is to arm prison officers with incapacitant spray. The Government presents it as a safety measure but the evidence clearly says the opposite. The Oireachtas justice committee, after hearing from human rights experts, prison specialists and international researchers, recommended this proposal be removed in its entirety, not amended or softened, but removed. We concluded that prison officers should not be armed with chemical spray at all. The reason is that the evidence from comparable jurisdictions is damning. I find it borderline insulting for the Minister to use overcrowding as a justification for a bad policy, when overcrowding is also a consequence of numerous other bad policies. HM Prison and Probation Service, when evaluating the use of PAVA spray in England and Wales, found it was "unable to conclusively demonstrate that the use of PAVA had any direct impact on levels of prison violence". The committee heard that in English and Welsh prisons, one third of uses were found to be unjustified, one quarter of uses were where alternatives existed and nearly two thirds of uses breached operational guidance. That means, in practice, chemical weapons are not used as a last resort. They are used when staff are stressed, when tempers are high, when systems are failing. Yet, the Government looked at all that, with the conditions of our prisons in mind, and still decided to proceeded, certainly not because the evidence supports it - if there is evidence supporting it, I would like the Minister to present it to us - but because overcrowding has made prisons more volatile and rather than fixing overcrowding, the Government has chosen to weaponise staff. That is not a safety policy. Those of us who have visited prisons, heard testimony - and I will go into the prison inspector's testimony shortly - and understand the nature and psychology of people in prisons where there is overcrowding know there is no way to spray an incapacitant spray in a overcrowded hallway and not impact the wider prison population. It is grotesquely unjustifiable in the conditions. Turning to community sanctions on the other side of the justice system this legislation covers, the Bill introduces modest changes to community service orders and that is welcome. However, let us be honest about the scale of the crisis we are in. Our prisons are operating miles beyond capacity. People are sleeping on floors every night. Rehabilitation, where it may have existed previously, has collapsed and people are quite literally dying in our prison system. The year before last, we had the highest level of prison deaths since records began. I am not sure whether the Minister looked at the justice committee testimony two weeks ago when the Inspector of Prisons was there. Even the jaws of those of us who asked for these discussions were on the floor due to the frankness with which the Inspector of Prisons spoke about conditions tantamount to torture and we are now bringing incapacitant spray into that environment. We will look back at this period with horror, with how casually we allowed human beings to be warehoused in degrading conditions. This change, where a change is being offered, is a slight tweak that will not address the issue it seeks to serve. It is a bare minimum. The joint committee explicitly called for much more. We called as a matter of urgency for the publication of the review of the criminal justice (community sanctions) Bill 2014, a Bill that would dramatically expand alternatives to custody, give judges a real menu of options and take immediate pressure off overcrowded prisons. Yet, 12 years later that Bill is nowhere to be seen. The Government knows exactly what would relieve the pressure but it is clearly unwilling to do it. Worse still, it ignored the committee's recommendation to include probation orders in the legislation where community service is not appropriate. That was an amendment I brought forward, which would have expanded non-custodial sentences even further. Again, there is an absence of ambition, no urgency and no vision. I am conscious that when those of us in the Chamber and at committees speak publicly, as I am now, about prison conditions, it is not a soft-on-crime approach. It is not a non-victim-centred approach either. The evidence speaks for itself. Almost seven out of ten people who enter our prison system will reoffend within three years. People who go into our prison systems have committed a crime. They have impacted people often in incredibly harmful ways and justice absolutely needs to served but too often that is the outcome for people going into prison. The profile of prisoners has been well demonstrated, including backgrounds, conditions of poverty and poor mental health. We were in Limerick prison a few weeks ago where we met a gentleman on the floor who did not even realise he was in prison, such was the extent of his Alzheimer's disease. Even if we take it as a whole, seven out of ten people going to prison should be the point where the State intervenes to address the factors by which we stop the next reoffending, the next victims being hurt and the next communities being terrorised. Quite clearly, there is no capacity to do that in our prison system, which is crumbling with antiquated architecture, buildings that are freezing cold, has people sleeping on the floor and has no access to proper rehabilitative outputs that could genuinely make prisoners play a constructive part in communities when they come out. I will turn to counselling records. There is no part of this Bill that exposes the moral limits of the Government more starkly than in what it does to survivors of sexual violence. Right now, defence teams can apply to access survivors' therapy records. We all know that. It is well documented. Everyone across the Chamber, no matter the political colours they wear, accepts that is wrong. These are the notes about when someone finally says the unsayable, when they try to process the violence done to them, where trust and safety are supposed to exist and somehow, our judicial system has decided that those notes, those insights to trauma, those written words that capture probably decades of oppression, victimhood, beatings and abuse are all fair game for a victim's judicial exploitation at trial. The justice committee heard overwhelming evidence on this and recommended in no uncertain terms, a complete and unconditional ban on the use of counselling records in sexual offence trials because survivors told us and we listened. I do not doubt for a second they have told the Minister also and he has listened too. I accept that completely. These applications are traumatising, they deter reporting and stop people seeking therapy at all. I have said it previously and I will continue to say it. We do not subpoena a priest's confession and we do not demand the notes of a TD's therapist, but a rape survivor's mind is apparently up for cross examination. We tell women to come forward, we tell them we believe them and then we betray them in the most intimate way imaginable. Yes, I understand there are constitutional complexities, as the Minister said, and he referred to the Attorney General's advice, but the laws of this land are not inscribed on a tablet upon a mountain top. The laws of the land are written down and can be modernised. If it is a requirement that we need a referendum to modernise the Constitution, I expect the Minister to lead on it because we cannot have a scenario where the opposite of justice - the antithesis of justice - happens, which is the re-traumatising of victims, and that is the scenario we have today. If it happens that the Minister's advice is better than the advice some of us will have when we table amendments on Committee Stage, let us modernise the Constitution because this cannot be allowed to continue. When we talk about the issue of sex for rent, or sexual exploitation for rent, it is the exact same story. We all agree and welcome aspects of this Bill that deal with that unimaginably cruel practice. My colleague Deputy O'Callaghan introduced a number of Bills in the previous Dáil on this. We all agree it is an exploitation and it is wrong. However, when the committee recommended real protections such as extending tenancy rights, regulating platforms and protecting people in informal housing, the response of the Government as a whole and not just simply the Minister was "Well, that is a housing problem", as if anyone in the country has faith left in the Department of housing, the same Department that has delivered thousands of homeless children and whose failures has forced people into desperate situations. We cannot separate sexual exploitation from housing insecurity but the Government has found a way to avoid responsibility. It is the same with the area of coercive control, which is also dealt with, to a point, in the Bill. I am not going to refer to any particular case that has recently been in the media, but recent cases have demonstrated how far we have to go when it comes to the area of coercive control and exploitation. Every Part of this Bill tells the same story: pepper spray instead of prison reform; minimal community sanctions instead of a real alternative; half measures for survivors; book passing on housing and the exploitation that exists within that grotesque area of failure; and now procedural gamesmanship on Garda powers. Yet, inside this Bill, we can still see the outlay of a different Ireland: prisons that rehabilitate instead of brutalise; a justice system that protects survivors; and housing that does not force people into exploitation. There is clearly money in our economy. We have the evidence and committee recommendations but we do not currently have a Government brave enough to follow them. The Bill shows everything that Ireland could be but it also shows us we are not there yet until we change the politics that produced it and keep getting legislation that gestures justice while quietly entrenching injustice.

Sentiment score: -0.11