Delay of a decade in passing covert surveillance laws

LAWS allowing for the use of covert surveillance are now likely to be passed more than a decade after they were first promised, in the aftermath of the Veronica Guerin murder.

And they were also promised by the-then Justice Minister, Brian Lenihan, 18 months ago amid a huge growth of gangland and gun crimes in Dublin and Limerick.

He made the announcement at the Garda graduation ceremony in Templemore in November 2007 and said it was a response to immense pressure on gardaí to deal with the “unprecedented number” of organised crime gangs.

However, indicating his scepticism to the laws by using bugged and intercepted conversations as evidence in prosecutions, he said gardaí ran the risk of “alerting criminals to investigative techniques”.

Following the murder of journalist Veronica Guerin in 1996, the Law Reform Commission published the heads of a bill on the use of surveillance evidence in court.

At the end of 2007, the Labour Party brought a bill before the Dáil, based on the Law Reform Commission document, which would give gardaí additional powers of surveillance including aural and visual surveillance, the interception of communications, the recording of conversations without the knowledge of all the parties and the surveillance of data equipment.

However, this was rejected by the Government parties.

In April 2008, Minister Lenihan said the Government would be publishing its own legislation on the matter and promised laws would be in place by the end of the year. Eight months later, there was no sign of the Bill and it became a political issue again in light of the murder of Shane Geoghegan in Limerick.

Labour’s justice spokesman Pat Rabbitte said at the time: “The lack of urgency is hard to understand.”

When current Justice Minister Dermot Ahern was appointed, he said the laws were likely to be brought before the Dáil by January. Taoiseach Brian Cowen said the laws would be passed “as quickly as possible”.

The Covert Surveillance Bill 2009 will now be “fast tracked” to come before the Dáil before the summer break.