Our stringent bail laws do not need changing, insists expert

IRELAND’S bail laws are among the most stringent in the world and do not need to changed, according to an eminent barrister.

Junior Counsel Paul Anthony McDermott was commenting on figures released by Fine Gael on Thursday which show 15 murders have been committed in the past two years where the prime suspect has been out on bail. Mr McDermott said denying people bail on the basis that they may commit another crime would put further pressure on an already overcrowded prison system.

“No politician ever did their election chances any harm by saying they were going to lock up more people. It’s ironic this story bubbles up again this week, in a week when the Governor of Mountjoy John Lonergan said he was retiring; and on Tuesday Mountjoy had 670 prisoners when it has a capacity for 540; and the Governor of the Dóchas Centre Kathleen McMahon said she was leaving her post, and it had 187 prisoners when it had space for 85.

“It’s one thing saying let’s lock up 10 people who we think have committed a bank robbery, but if you were told, in order to do so, you would have to release 10 who have actually been convicted of a bank robbery, you might think twice.”

Mr McDermott said it was impossible to deny someone bail for a minor offence on the basis that they may go on to commit a serious offence. “You look at a statistic of 15 robberies committed since 2008 by people on bail. How many of those could you have predicted? For example, I would like to see what the facts were in each of those cases. Some of them could have been people who were charged with serious crimes and maybe they should have been refused bail. But equally some of those could be people charged with stealing a handbag. It’s hard to refuse somebody like that bail for two years while they wait for their trial because somebody has decided they could predict they were going to commit a murder,” he said.

The barrister also said Irish bail laws were amongst the strictest in the world and it was impossible to prevent people committing crime while released on bail.

“It’s very hard to tighten our bail laws that much further. Very simply, the Irish Supreme Court said under our constitution, you generally can’t lock people up on a preventative basis. We had a referendum a few years ago which said you can lock people up on a preventative basis if you think they are going to commit a serious crime, in other words, a crime which carried a penalty of more than five years. That makes our bail laws one of the strictest in the world.”

The comments were made in the same week as AdVIC, the advocacy group for families of murder victims, called for laws to be introduced to stop people accused of murder being granted bail.