Michael McDowell
National University of Ireland · Independent · Ireland
“Then I think of this particular Chamber where people are polite and kind to each other and listen to each other respectfully. There is no baying or shouting down or whatever. It is a great tribute to the Seanad staff that that spirit continues to exist in this House.”
“I note that the whole scheme of the planning Act is that exempt development proposals are considered by the Houses. It is questionable whether this House has really considered the exempt development regulations. Without debate, we sent them off to a committee.”
“I am one of the people who disagrees with the substance of that report. We have to have a real solid debate on it here in this House, not merely a cursory one. It is an issue of fundamental importance. It cannot be avoided, one way or the other. Whatever your views are on it, it needs to be thrashed out.”
“Although coming up to the end of this term we are rushing things through, and the guillotine is well-oiled and slicing this way and that, we have a lot of work to do in the autumn.”
“The people who did that were brought before the International Court of Justice and condemned and imprisoned. If Ireland does not clearly state that there are to be consequences for people who do things like what Mladić, Milošević and Karadžić were brought to account for, if we are incapable as a State of publicly saying that what Secretar…”
“If we cannot, as a State, say publicly to Rubio, "Hands off the International Criminal Court", when they were quite happy when the people who did the 7,000 murders in Srebrenica got their just desserts, but when there is any suggestion that what has happened in Gaza, with 70,000 innocent people killed by aerial bombardment and land bombar…”
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“Another issue the Minister should think about, and maybe it is for another miscellaneous provisions Bill, is, where people have been convicted of offences, to make it a requirement that the deed poll provisions are controlled to some extent in that at least there is notification to the authorities and some notification on the register, especially in the case of people who have been the subject of recent convictions that they do not simply change their name and walk off into the sunshine as if nothing had happened. Those are merely some reflections I have.”
“Some of it seems to be people changing their names to reflect their gender status change under gender recognition legislation but others are mildly surprising. If the Minister is to have protection for victims of domestic violence and registration of those people, a lot of the good involved in that is cleared away if somebody can simply change their name and bash on. It occurred to me, for instance, that to change your name by deed poll, you should at least give your address. In the register, your address does not appear and if Seán Power becomes Seán McMahon, nobody knows where that person is. He could be in Donegal. He could be in Wexford. Nobody knows who that person is. That is a point.”
“Whereas I welcome the idea of miscellaneous provisions Bills, they have to be, in my view, married to transparency in the Statute Book by means of ensuring that anybody who looks up the revised statutes will find an appropriate reference to the changes that were made here. I could spend time talking about the individual portions of it but I will not do that. I will raise one matter with the Minister, and that is that a lot of what is going on at the moment in terms of registers and the like presupposes that people are easily identified. I was checking up today on the method of changing your name by deed poll and I would invite Members of this House to look at the register of deed poll activity. It is quite substantial.”
“I also believe that the protection of military installations provision is very important. If people invade an Army barracks, what force can be used to repel them? This at least sets out a test that as long as the force used to defend the security facility is reasonable, proportionate and necessary, it is lawful. I am glad to see that kind of provision being expressly stated. One thing I would say to the Minister about legislation of this kind is that because it is so miscellaneous in its character, it is important that the process of reflecting its contents in restatements of statutes is carried out because otherwise you will be looking at what appear to be complete statutes and you will not know that a change was made to that statute in Part 12 of this Bill.”
“We believed that we were there to protect the gardaí and to use our weapons to protect their lives if necessary but it was not very clear to us what would happen if any of us inflicted injury on somebody else in this context. In respect of aid of the civil power, subsection 5 of the new section 40B refers to assistance provided by the Defence Forces to An Garda Síochána under this section. That possibly could be widened to the Prison Service. I am thinking back to Portlaoise and to occasions when there was a threat of industrial action in the Prison Service which could have given rise to a State emergency. When I was Minister, we had the Defence Forces carry out surveys of the prisons with a view to ensuring the safety of the State. That is something that could be looked at.”
“Some of the individual components are non-controversial and I presume will not cause any significant delay. However, in respect of some items, for instance the provisions in relation to the cancellation effectively as a matter of law of homosexual convictions, need to be looked at quite carefully indeed. Putting in place a specific power in the Defence Act covering acting in aid of the civil power is a very wise provision. As somebody who actually in my time did act in aid of the civil power a long time ago, I often wondered precisely what the authority was for my deployment, sitting in a ditch on the Concession Road along the Border with a with a machine gun in my hand and gardaí carrying out road checks on vehicles and passengers. I wondered precisely what our rights were in the circumstance.”
“I welcome the Minister here today. I indicate my support in general for this Bill and for the initiative the Minister is taking in proposing a Bill with a diverse category of miscellaneous provisions in it. I agree with him completely that it is difficult to organise legislative time and difficult to get measures through the Attorney General's office and the parliamentary draftsman’s office. If everything is done in a segmented way as the Minister implied, a lot of worthwhile initiatives will be postponed or never addressed even when there would be in general terms a consensus right across the political spectrum that the amendments or the provisions of the Bill or similar Bills are desirable. The Bill is a comprehensive Bill and cannot be rushed through.”
“-----that a blind approach is what is required, but the simple fact is that that is the same in England as well. The Home Secretary in England would say exactly the same - "I want no discrimination and I expect no discrimination" - but the facts prove otherwise.”
“I am trying to be reasonable. All I am saying is that I hear what the Minister has said but the issue is not as described by him. It is not about whether men and women are unfairly discriminated in relation to these matters. I can see that some sections of the population are more likely to feature than others. I fully accept that proposition. What I am saying, however, is that Ireland is deliberately blinding itself to the reality of the deployment of these powers in similar jurisdictions in which racial minorities-----”
“There is no connection between the two, and we will never connect people up with a common identifier unless they are convicted of an offence and unless there has been some court process. Nobody will be in a position, and gardaí are not entitled, to ask for a common identifier of people whom they search. If such a power were to be conferred on the Garda, the accusations of Big Brother would be enormous. It would be said that the Garda was effectively keeping an eye on people whom gardaí randomly stopped and searched and was able to connect them by a common identifier with other brushes they may or may not have had with the criminal justice system. I regret to say I am not persuaded. On this occasion the Minister has made it very clear he does not intend putting into effect in Ireland what is required in Northern Ireland and Great Britain.”
“What I do say is that it is important, if we are introducing the stop and search powers of this kind, that we do what I believe the European Convention on Human Rights, ECHR, would require of any responsible member state and what is done right across the various constituent parts of the United Kingdom to at least make it clear what age groups are being more or less affected by the deployment of these powers. I believe there is no decent answer to a similar requirement existing in Irish police procedure. The Minister's reference to the programme for Government and the plan to have a common identifier for people who are in contact with An Garda Síochána based on the PPS number have nothing to do with the proposition as to what kind of person is likely to be stopped at random on a street in Dublin.”
“I reiterate my point that on any view of effective policing, it is quite possible that particular stop and search incidents are going to weigh more heavily on people in certain categories. I have no doubt but that that will be the case and it does not necessarily suggest racism, ageism, misogyny or whatever words are thrown about in such circumstances. I have no doubt that statistical homogeneity is never going to be achieved in the way in which these powers are actually applied by any effective police force.”
“This comes down, in the end, to the wilful decision, I think, emanating from An Garda Síochána that they do not want in the Republic of Ireland the same obligation to provide material or to record material, which is required under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act in the UK and equality legislation to be the subject of, number one, a record, and number two, accountability, in order to ensure that the law is fairly and impartially applied between different sections of society based on their status. I do not believe, and I do not think anybody thinks, that the forces of law and order north of the Border or on the island of Britain are impeded by making the kind of record which shows conclusively whether the use of stop and search powers is used disproportionately in respect of some groups in society.”
“It is not setting out to achieve accuracy as to who is or who is not the subject of a number of encounters with the criminal justice system, which could only happen in the context of a conviction unless the Minister is going to introduce some system whereby people have to, on demand, when they are being searched, yield up their PPS number, which is nonsense in my view.”
“The point I am making is that the PPS number would only come into play where someone was convicted and then there is the common identifier that Michael McDowell of such and such a number was convicted of assault in Dundalk District Court and the same person was commonly identified, by that number, as having engaged in theft somewhere else. It would be very clear, and should be clear, to the Garda that a repeat offender - a person who was convicted of a number of things in different places - is identified clearly as being the same person and not just somebody with a similar name. That is not what this amendment set out to achieve.”
“Again, the Minister said that he would confirm to Senator Keogan whether this kind of material is recorded and we are having a Report Stage debate before that information was furnished to her, which I think is unfortunate to put it mildly. As for the common identifier idea the Minister has mentioned based on the PPS or whatever else, just imagine it is the PPS number. The PPS is not recorded on the street. No reasonable person, and none of us, know our PPS numbers unless we have a robotic memory. If a Garda asked me for my PPS number I would have to tell him that I have no idea whatsoever. Maybe it is my VAT number or it is the same number.”
“If somebody is stopped and searched, the Minister's text requires it to be said that there was a search, these were the reasons for the search, and this is the main address and age of the person involved. Section 8 states that a member of An Garda Síochána is entitled to "require the person to provide his or her name, address and date of birth". That provision is already in the Bill. The additional entitlement that the amendment would make to allow the Minister, in his discretion, to include further material to be recorded does not complicate anything if the Minister decides that ethnicity, race or nationality are irrelevant. Senator Keogan, after Committee Stage, informed me that she was told by members of An Garda Síochána that these are recorded.”
“Briefly, I want to reply, if I may, to the Minister's contribution. First, the information which a member of An Garda Síochána is obliged, under the Minister's text, to establish under section 13(2)(a), is "the name, address and date of birth of the person or, as the case may be, the driver of the vehicle". Those are three things which certainly are mandatory requirements of the report of a stop and search. If we are into questionnaires on the side of a street, those things have to be recorded and the reason for the search has to be recorded. According to section 13(2)(e): "the outcome of the search" has to be recorded. The Minister mentioned the accumulation of information, in searches that yield nothing, would complicate matters. It is already required to be made.”
“(2) The Minister shall as soon as practicable lay the report furnished to him under this section before each House of the Oireachtas.”. This amendment arises out of the extensive debate we have had on this matter. I do not propose to repeat it or to extend today's proceedings to go back over all of the reasons that were advanced by Members of the House in relation to this matter. The amendment is designed to enable the publication of statistics about stop and search by the Minister so as to assure the public that these kind of stop-and-search powers are being properly and impartially administered.”
“I move amendment No. 4: In page 12, between lines 9 and 10, to insert the following: "Report on the operation of search and seizures 14. (1) It shall be the duty of the Commissioner to furnish to the Minister at least once in every calendar year a report containing the following data in anonymised format: (a) the total number of searches made under section 9; (b) the total number of searches made under section 10; (c) the total number of searches made under sections 9 and 10 where such searches did not result in the seizure of a relevant article of evidence relating to the commission of an offence; (d) such other information as the Minister may prescribe by regulation in relation to the age, gender, race, nationality and social status (including membership of the traveller community) of persons searched or of the drivers of vehicles searched.”
“I know it is slightly out of order but, with the permission of the Chair, I just want to say that I do not take subsections (3) and (4) as being the entire purpose of the record being created. It is important for other general reasons of accountability of An Garda Síochána, regardless of whether or not the individual wants a record, that there is a proper record of the places of a search, the people who were searched and the outcomes of the search available to the Minister and the Commissioner. In those circumstances, given that the Minister has conceded that the place of a search will in fact be available, I do not see any reason it should not be put in. I ask the Minister to reconsider the matter before he gets to Dáil Éireann.”
“If the Minister would tell me that the Commissioner of An Garda Síochána regards it as unduly onerous to say where a search took place, that is fine, but it is simply obstructive because that material will be on PULSE. If I am stopped on Grafton Street, the PULSE record will say that is what happened and that I was not somewhere else, for example, on O'Connell Street. I believe the record will state that and, therefore, I cannot see that there is any additional imposition on An Garda Síochána in simply recording where searches took place, rather than just simply the fact that a search took place. In the end, people will look back on this debate and this amendment and they will say there is no need whatsoever to record the place where a search took place. There is none because the Seanad decided that it was not part of a proper record.”
“The Minister will recall that Senator Ruane expressed a desire there should be some record of the number of times that people are brought to a custody suite under the powers in the Bill as opposed to cursory searches on the street. She was concerned that those personal searches were a major intrusion, especially when carried out in a custody suite, on the liberty and freedom of movement of people who are searched. Effectively, they are detained and brought to a Garda station and subject to a search. I am not simply dealing with what she was concerned with, which was internal or cavity searches, but general searches involving strip searches, for instance, which are entirely justified in many circumstances and entirely necessary in limited circumstances.”
“If the Minister could say, with his hand on his heart, that the PULSE record would not say it was on Grafton Street of wherever that I was searched, I would take what he is saying and think it was a very conservative position but maybe there was some sense in what he is saying. I believe that any record made by any member of An Garda Síochána of a stop and search will mention the place where it happened. The Minister may have forgotten the particular debate on Committee Stage that gave rise to the amendment was that some of the other Members of the House wanted there to be some data as to whether or not people were brought to custody suites for personal searches or not.”
“This amendment is very simple and again refers to page 11. It relates to the record of a search under sections 9 and 10, which is required by section 13(2)(b), and amends it to include the time, place and date of the search. That would cover circumstances where people are brought to special custody suites. In any event, there is no reason the place of the search should not be recorded on PULSE, wherever it is made and in whatever circumstance.”
“I do not see how section 11(4) adds anything to the scope of section 15, which is the failure to comply with the requirement that is made of anybody. I do not see how the special provisions in section 11(4) are required. If someone has done a runner having been stopped, by doing that he or she has failed to comply with the garda's direction under section 11. He or she has committed an offence because he or she will have failed to be in or on or accompany the vehicle, as may be appropriate, for as long as is necessary to complete the search.”
“It is a significant enough point that if a member of An Garda Síochána decides to search a vehicle under sections 9 or 10, he or she can also, for instance, under section 11(2)(b), "where the place at which the member finds the vehicle is, in the member's reasonable opinion, unsuitable for such search, take the vehicle or cause it to be taken or require the driver forthwith to take the vehicle to a specific place which the member considers suitable for such search". The person could be asked to bring it to the yard at the back of a Garda station under that power. He or she is effectively under arrest if he or she is required to bring his or her car to some place that a member of An Garda Síochána tells him or her to bring it and he or she is obliged to do that forthwith.”
“I said at the beginning that I know what the amendment is trying to achieve. If somebody does a runner, he or she is already caught by section 15 because he or she has failed to comply with section 11(2)(c) and is liable to be arrested if he or she does a runner. The particular need for section 11(4) is not apparent to me. If someone is required under section 11(2)(c) to "be in or on or accompany the vehicle, as may be appropriate, for so long as necessary to complete the search" and if he or she fails to do that, he or she already committed an offence under section 15. Section 11(4) adds nothing to that.”
“Let us be clear that this section actually says that the driver is required to be in or on or to accompany the vehicle, as may be appropriate, for so long as is necessary to complete the search. We are talking here about somebody who has had a requirement made of them. Such a person is deemed to have failed to have complied with it if, at any time while the requirement is made, he "is not, in, on or accompanying the vehicle". If he goes to use the bathroom in a pub near where the thing has happened, he has committed an offence because he has refused to comply with this requirement. It is not well drafted - that is all I would say. That is the reason I have proposed its removal in its present form.”
“It says that a person will be deemed "to have failed to comply with that requirement" if, at any time, they are not in the vehicle. That is bad drafting, again. It really is. If the Minister is bringing this to Dáil Éireann, he should have another look at that because I would not like his Bill to be laughed out of court or Dáil Éireann. If, at some stage, a person gets out of the car, they are deemed to have a committed a criminal offence if they have been required to drive the car to a place where it can be inspected. That cannot be right, and it is badly drafted. I know what it is driving at. I think the draftsman in the Attorney General's office could come up with a better attempt to achieve what the common-sense view of it is probably intended to achieve.”
“I need to get a clear indication of what is being talked about here. For the purposes of determining whether a person has failed to comply with a requirement, and for the purposes of criminalising them, they will be deemed "to have failed to comply with that requirement where he or she, at any time while the requirement is in force [whatever that means] is not in, on or accompanying the vehicle in relation to which the requirement was made". I have to say I do not understand that. I think I know what it is driving at, in that if a person walks away from the car, they are deemed to be failing to comply with the requirement to bring it somewhere so that it can be searched. I think I understand that, but that is not what this subsection says. It does not say that.”
“Section 15 provides that a person who "shall be guilty of an offence" will: be liable— (i) on summary conviction, to a class A fine or to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 12 months, or to both, or (ii) on conviction on indictment, to a fine not exceeding €30,000 or to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 5 years, or to both. The latter provision makes it an arrestable offence. Let us read section 11(4) again: A person of whom a requirement under paragraph (c) of subsection (2) is made shall, for the purposes of section 15 [in other words, to determine whether he or she has committed an offence], be considered to have failed to comply with that requirement where he or she, at any time while the requirement is in force, is not in, on or accompanying the vehicle in relation to which the requirement was made.”
“Amendment No. 2 seeks to delete lines 16 to 19 on page 11 of the Bill, as amended on Committee Stage. Those lines refer to "A person of whom a requirement under paragraph (c) of subsection (2) is made". The paragraph in question - section 11(2)(c) of the Bill - provides that a garda may "require the driver to be in or on or to accompany the vehicle, as may be appropriate, for so long as is necessary to complete the search". Section 11(4) of the Bill, which we are proposing to delete, refers to "the purposes of section 15 ", which, as we will discover when we read section 15, is another way of saying for the purposes of committing an offence.”
“We have to be careful about the powers we give An Garda Síochána. I am in favour of the Garda having effective powers but not overweening powers. It was in that spirit that this amendment was offered to delete the section, because it is bad law. I put it to the Minister, if he wants to, either in this House on Report Stage, which, unfortunately, is now being guillotined, or in Dáil Éireann, to come up with a proper section 8. Undoubtedly, some legislative measure incorporating some of the elements of section 8 is a sensible arrangement but this is not the way to do business.”
“Persons against whom that power to identify themselves with their name, address and date of birth is deployed are not in a position to say, "Well, this may be the statute law but this garda is asking me now, in the street or in some other public place where he is lawfully present, for this information and telling me that if I do not give it to him, I will be committing an offence and because I do not know whether the Minister's view of what is implied or explicit is correct, I cannot risk being arrested for an offence." When we are drafting legislation and considering the work of the draftsman in circumstances such as this, our job is to get it right and not to say, "Seanad Éireann saw problems with this and the Minister said that if there was a problem, he would address it in a Dáil amendment, rather than dealing with it in this House." I refer to the widening functions of An Garda Síochána and the new security section, which has been established as Ireland's secret service, effectively.”
“I am not going to call a vote on this because the Minister has said he will look at it again. However, it is not good enough for the people drafting the legislation to come up with a section of that kind and say that this or that is implicit in it. That power is given to a member of An Garda Síochána.”
“Why, therefore, should not the definition of "offence" be similarly linked? If someone cannot be searched except on the suspicion of one of the "relevant article" offences in section 7, why can people be stopped and asked for their name, address and date of birth for any offence? It is not just simply the location; it is also the enormous breadth of the suggestion that if a member of An Garda Síochána believes that somebody has committed an offence as a historical fact, they can ask that person, when they see them in the street, for their name, address and date of birth, without limit. The point about it being in a public place or that being implicit in it is not the only problem with section 8. It far too broadly and, I suggest, excessively widely drafted at the moment. It needs to be tightened up. It really is not correct.”
“That is not the way we do business. If we want to make it applicable to public places, we should say so. Print and ink are not so expensive that we cannot actually say what we mean and that we leave things implicit in circumstances such as this. On another point, if the Minister considers section 9, he will see that it mentions the power to search somebody for a "relevant article", which is defined in section 7 as anything stolen or obtained unlawfully, explosive materials, controlled drugs, firearms and ammunition, any article the possession of which is in contravention of the Firearms Act, syringes where the person concerned might use them to cause injury to another person, computer programmes and computer passwords and encryption keys. Those are the things which the power of search relates to.”
“Briefly, by way of reply, the problem is with the Minister saying that in his view, it is implicit that that is the case. That is not the way in which we should be legislating. Somebody on the street who is confronted by a garda, or somebody who is somewhere else where a garda is lawfully present, and the garda claims he suspects him of having committed any offence, at any time in the past, is not going to be able to search the Dáil record. He will not be able to say the Minister seemed to think that this was confined to public places and, therefore, it is his right not to have these particulars demanded of him by a member of An Garda Síochána and his right to refrain from giving his name, address and date of birth on pain of committing a criminal offence means that he can safely tell the garda to get lost.”
“In all probability the Dáil's consideration will also be guillotined, the way we are going. I get concerned about the legislative process that is leading to an inadequate section being rubber-stamped without a fair opportunity for people to tease out what it actually means. If the Minister is saying it is fine as it stands and he is not going to change it that is one issue, but he led the House to believe he would consider tightening it up and now there is no sign of any amendment to the Bill arising out of what happened on Committee Stage.”
“This is a blank cheque being given to stop anybody in the street who a member of An Garda Síochána has reason to believe or suspect has committed any offence - trivial, serious or whatever. This is the new power. It does not even just apply to stopping persons in the street. It applies to people anywhere that a garda can lawfully confront any person and ask them for their identification in the manner prescribed. In that vein, I propose the deletion of this section until such time as the Minister comes up with an acceptable section. We cannot be asked to accept it is defective and too wide but that the Minister may go to the Dáil and come up with a different section, or a different wording for the section, and if we pass it in this House in a guillotined debate, we will get around to reconsidering it later in the Dáil.”
“We are being asked to rush through consideration of this legislation but we are being deprived of a Minister standing in this House and informing the House about what The Sunday Times was so elaborately briefed on last Sunday, what difference this new agency will make and what the limitations and reporting requirements will be for it. When you look at what has happened in Britain, MI5 and MI6 are much less secret organisations than they used to be, or at least we think they are. I get worried that the democratic aspects of what we get up to, including considering section 8 in all its inadequacy, is railroaded through on a guillotine motion without people carefully considering what powers An Garda Síochána really are going to have, how they will be deployed, who in an An Garda Síochána will deploy them and in what circumstances.”
“It also stated, "The bureau will also serve as the counter-espionage agency, protecting the government, politicians, state agencies and the gardaí themselves." This perhaps is slightly irrelevant to amendment No. 1 but we are giving in section 8 the right to any member of An Garda Síochána, including these people, to stop anybody on the street who they believe has committed an offence in the past, no matter what the offence is, and to demand of them their name, address and date of birth. Section 8 is so badly drafted they could be plain-clothes gardaí or gardaí who are part of this new security service.”
“It occurs to me that if we are setting up a specialised security agency within An Garda Síochána with specialised resources and the like, insofar as that is something new, there should have been, first, an announcement by the Minister for justice and, second, it should have been made to the Houses of the Oireachtas and brought before the justice committee of the Oireachtas to discuss what this new agency will actually do, how it will be different from what is going on at the moment and what precisely on the face of it we are involving ourselves with. The story as published stated, "A detective chief superintendent has been appointed to lead the security service and its state-of-the-art technology". We do not know what that is. Is it surveillance? I do not know.”
“It is the case that under section 7 of the Garda Síochána Act 2005 that protecting the security of the State is already a function of An Garda Síochána. I was a bit mystified as to why the establishment of a security service as a separate branch of An Garda Síochána should be announced by the deputy commissioner in circumstances such as this through a press release to a particular journalist.”
“The proper procedure is that the Department should have allowed itself a good week or two to consider whether it wants to tighten up the incredibly lax aspects of this section and to do something about it. While I am on the subject of these Garda powers, last Sunday, the deputy Garda commissioner, Paul Cleary, was the subject of a story in The Sunday Times saying that An Garda Síochána is to launch a dedicated security service to counter the activities of hostile states, domestic and international terrorism and extremism in all its forms. The agency will be called An Garda Síochána security service. The deputy commissioner is quoted as describing its establishment as "significant in the force's history but necessary given the unfolding security landscape across Europe".”
“I had hoped that the Minister would allow sufficient time between Committee Stage and Report Stage to address the unnecessarily wide scope of that particular provision. However, for some reason, this is very urgent. We, therefore, find ourselves in the position that the Minister has tendered no amendments on Report Stage. He has not reflected anything that happened on Committee Stage, which was guillotined. We now find ourselves in the position that we are being asked to say as a House that section 8, in its present state, is acceptable. It is not acceptable. The Minister may think that he might go to Dáil Éireann having had more time to consider the matter and amend it there, but that will involve coming back here with the amended section.”
“The Minister seemed to share my view that was an unnecessarily broad power to confer on any member of An Garda Síochána. It means that virtually anybody who has committed an offence in the past can have his or her name, date of birth and address demanded by any member of An Garda Síochána. For instance,if a garda suspects a person who has in the past committed an offence and has been convicted of it is abroad, on the streets or wherever else, this section is so lazily drafted that it gives a garda the right to stop that person and ask him or her, not merely his or her name, but also his or her current address and date of birth. It is an offence not to give it to the garda in those circumstances. The reason that I proposed its deletion was that in its present form, it is unacceptable.”
“Section 8 provides: A member who has reasonable grounds to suspect that a person— (a) has committed, or is committing, an offence, or (b) is in possession of a relevant article, may require the person to provide his or her name, address and date of birth to the member. It is not in any sense limited to a public place. It is not limited to circumstances in which a search has been undertaken. It is not limited as to what kind of offence that we are concerned with. The Bill is concerned with quite a broad spectrum of serious offences but here we are empowering any member of An Garda Síochána who comes into contact with any person anywhere in the State whom he or she has reason to suspect has committed any offence at any time in the past and saying that he or she can demand that person's name, address and date of birth.”
“I express my deep regret that a guillotine has been proposed for this legislation. The number of amendments tabled for consideration could be dealt with quite comfortably within the time period allocated to it. It may be that the proposed guillotine will be academic. We have to strongly protest that the Government has become addicted to using the guillotine even today when it not necessary. There is no call for it, nor is there any suggestion that this is being unnecessarily delayed or the like. The amendment relates proposes to delete lines 25 to 30 on page 9. It was tabled on the basis that the Minister indicated on Committee Stage that he understood concerns that I raised about the general aspect of the existing section 8, as drafted. I wish for the record of this House to show what those concerns are.”