OPINION:There is a serious absence of evidence supporting Dermot Ahern's draconian Criminal Justice Bill, writes MARK KELLY
HOW WOULD you feel if you were serving on a jury and a lawyer told you that he had no evidence apart from a couple of stories that his friends had told him? If he was a trained solicitor who whispered in your ear that solicitors could not be trusted?
If he insisted that you could not be relied upon to do your job, and that finding the truth is best left to the legal profession? Would you be convinced?
Dermot Ahern TD, solicitor and Minister for Justice is having a hard time selling the Criminal Justice (Amendment) Bill to the Dáil. The Minister is proposing that gangland trials be transferred to the non-jury Special Criminal Court. Yet he has produced no hard evidence that jury intimidation is a factor that inhibits convictions in gangland cases.
When pressed on this point, he has fallen back on two old stories supplied by Limerick TD Willie O’Dea, and a single anecdote from Limerick State Solicitor Michael Murray.
It is unsurprising that the Minister has difficulty finding evidence to support these tales, because the evidence does not exist. As we learned from a letter that he sent to Charlie Flanagan TD on July 3rd, 2009, the Garda authorities do not consider it worthwhile to keep separate records of jury, as opposed to witness, intimidation.
The deaths of Roy Collins, Shane Geoghegan and Brian Fitzgerald arose in relation to witness intimidation, not the intimidation of juries, yet witness intimidation is ignored in the Bill.
State Solicitor Michael Murray has also offered an explanation for another dubious section of the Bill: secret detention hearings excluding lawyers. He has claimed that this “unusual piece of legislation was promoted by concern within certain official circles that a tiny minority of solicitors are harvesting information on operational matters and passing them on to the criminal fraternity and effectively acting as criminal intelligence officers for criminal gangs”.
No evidence has been produced to support this very serious allegation. The director general of the Law Society has commented that this claim “has a tendency to damage all solicitors, especially defence solicitors, and it is startling to see it being used as a basis for a change in the law”.
Dermot Ahern has yet to distance himself from remarks that could be read as denigrating a profession of which he himself is a member.
Now that the Minister has been publicly exposed as lacking the evidence to back up the promises that he has made to victims families, his supporters seem to be resorting to ever more desperate measures.
Two articles on this page yesterday made completely unfounded allegations against those of us who have set out a solid case against the Bill.
Stephen O’Byrnes, a former PD spindoctor, accused human rights and civil liberties bodies of having “selective concern for the human rights of citizens engaged in criminal activity”, adding that this “does serious damage to the reputation” of organisations such as the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL).
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Even the briefest of visits to the ICCL’s website would have confirmed that the ICCL is opposed to Dermot Ahern’s controversial “gangland” Bill precisely because the Bill completely neglects the rights of witnesses and victims of violent crime.
If Stephen O'Byrnes had lingered a little longer, he could have downloaded the ICCL's 2008 document, The Human Rights of Victims in the Criminal Justice System. Research for that report included meetings with 16 victims' organisations. The ICCL concluded that the human rights of crime victims in Ireland are not sufficiently protected, and called upon the Government to adopt a series of practical measures to give greater protection to victims. To this day, that call remains unheeded.
Kevin O’Connor slung even filthier mud when he suggested that “lawyers who deliver obstruction of a Bill designed to convict gangsters more speedily” have “sullied” the deaths of Roy Collins, Shane Geoghegan and Brian Fitzgerald. This is a truly foul claim.
Not a shred of evidence has been produced that Dermot Ahern’s Bill will speed up the process of bringing gangland criminals to trial, and it is the Minister himself who has consistently relied upon deep public sympathy for these innocent, decent and honourable men in order to cloak the hollowness of his own claims.
What could it be that has prompted supporters of the Minister to plumb such depths?
Might it be that they realise the rocky passage of this Bill through the Dáil will pale in comparison with the legal quagmire in which it will find itself once referred to the Supreme Court, or challenged through the ordinary courts?
When that happens, and it is time to explain to the families of victims why their lives have not improved, might it not be appealing to have someone else to blame for the legislative mess that Dermot Ahern appears determined to create?
Mark Kelly is the director of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties. www.iccl.ie