Brideshead and the Bull miss the boat on justice brief

IT MAY be that Nora Owen realised weeks ago that the fault over the Duncan extradition warrants lay on she may be that she failed to communicate that realisation or suspicion to the what?

It may be that John Bruton was probably informed of her suspicions long before last Sunday week. It could be that he to failed to communicate this to the Dail. So what?

To some observers, either or both of these "reticences" were as bad as, indeed worse than, the "reticence" of Albert Reynolds over the Duggan case on November 15th, 1994 the "reticence" that led to his downfall.

But what on earth was that 1994 crisis about? Indeed, what on earth was there about the further "revelations" on December 6th, 1994, that brought about the collapse of the Bertie Ahern Dick Spring coalition plans? (Absolutely nothing then emerged that hadn't been fully revealed by Maire Geoghegan Quinn to the Dail on November 16th, 1994.)

We have an amazing capacity to be seized by frenzies every so often, frenzies that have no basis in substance, or at least relatively no basis in substance. The very worst that Nora Owen or John Bruton are now guilty of is withholding information from the Dail and, possibly, misleading the Dail.

Of course they shouldn't do that and of course it makes nonsense of their claims to transparency and openness. But let's get a grip. There is no issue of substance at the base of all this just an understandable human error, deserving hardly of the mildest of rebukes. It don't amount to a hill of beans.

Quite a few other things do amount to a hill of beans and nothing at all gets said about them. And quite a few of them relate to the same Mrs Owens's area of responsibility.

About 14 months ago, Mrs Owen appeared on RTE's Farrell programme. Without the agreement of her Government colleagues, she announced that proposals would be introduced to compromise the most fundamental of civil liberties, the liberty of the person. She said she was going to seek to change the constitutional guarantee to bail.

FAR from denouncing the Minister for this preposterous proposition and I will seek to establish below why this is preposterous the two Opposition spokes persons on Justice, Mr John O'Donoghue and Ms Liz O'Donnell, denounced her for not following through on this travesty of liberty and, incidentally, of cabinet collective responsibility as well.

I had occasion to interview on radio both of those representatives in the last few months. Neither of them had a bull's notion of the incidence of crime committed by people on bail. And yet, in the absence of any idea whether this was significant or indeed a problem at all, they were rooting for a fundamental change to our legal system. Ms O'Donnell said it was unfair of me to expect her to have done the research necessary to establish the incidence of crime committed by people on bail she was far too busy for that.

The basic research would have involved looking at the latest annual report of the Garda Siochana. In the foreword (page 3) to that report it is revealed that the total number of crimes committed in 1994 was 101,036. On page 67 there is a simple user friendly (even Opposition spokesperson on Justice friendly) chart which reveals that out of the 101,036 crimes committed in 1994, 4,416 were found to have been committed by people on bail. Yes, a mere 4.4 per cent of the total crimes.

Since that effort would have taken either of them all of 37 seconds, they might have found time to consult the Law Reform Commission report on bail. A 37 second flick through that report would have brought them to Table B on page 36 which gives the breakdown of crimes committed by people on bail in 1993. In that year, the massive total of 3,201 crimes were committed by people on bail.

This would have revealed that almost all of the crimes committed on bail were of a relatively (please note "relatively") minor nature burglary (1,170), car theft (446) and larcenies from shops or staffs (299).

A tiny proportion of the serious crimes committed that year were committed by persons on bail (eight armed robberies out of a total of 128), (two rapes out of a total of 141).

So how then is bail such a serious issue? How has bail become the touchstone of policy on crime generally?

Nora Owen's proposal to jail people for crimes they might commit rather than for crimes they have committed was preposterous, especially in the light of the insignificance of the bail issue to the crime phenomenon. The two opposition justice characters, a.k.a. Bull McCabe and the leading actress from Brideshead Revisited, missed the point and the boat.

TAKE also the prisons' issue. The medical services in the main section of Mountjoy Prison are palpably inadequate and have been so for several years. This has been highlighted repeatedly by successive reports of the Mountjoy Visiting Committee.

The Department of Justice accepts that the medical services are grossly inadequate and have made some efforts to do something about it. But the net outcome of these efforts has been zilch. The Department apparently can do nothing because of obduracy on the part of the Irish Medical Organisation and fear of the Prison Officers Association.

Isn't this pathetic? And not a cheep from Brideshead and the Bull.

Not a murmur from Brideshead and the Bull either about the appalling revelation that prison officers in Limerick Prison had beaten up a prisoner and then badly beaten a prison officer who intervened to stop them beating the prisoner.

Not a word either over the failure of the criminal justice system to do anything about the flagrant instances of corporate crime.

And all three of them the Minister, Brideshead and the Bull have made no serious effort to address the primary cause of so much of our crime, the problem of drug addiction. Lots of entirely meaningless stuff about the "drug barons" (don't we all know by now that if one set of drug barons are locked up another set of drug barons will emerge because of the huge profits that can be made from the drugs trade?) but no real practical action or proposals on how to deal with the "demand side" by providing the necessary resources for treatment.

There would be a point to getting oneself thrown out of the Dail on that.