Fighting crime - Delays on DNA law are a scandal

The condemnation of the murder of Detective Garda Adrian Donohoe in Louth last Friday evening has been widespread and sincere.

Tomorrow’s State funeral will be a sober and distressing affair, especially for Det Garda Donohoe’s wife and children, family, friends, and colleagues. His community, his colleagues, and this society will publicly express their — our — deep revulsion at the cold-blooded, unprovoked killing.

Inevitably every political party in the State will be represented at the funeral and, inevitably, each will echo the other in their condemnation of the first murder of a garda in 17 years.

Unfortunately, the value of those declarations is greatly diminished by the track record of this Government and their immediate predecessors in enacting legislation and providing the tools needed to defeat the kind of people who shot Det Garda Donohoe dead.

Jails routinely hold multiples of the number of prisoners they were designed for yet all the talk, all the gung-ho, about building a new super jail, has amounted to little or nothing. The credibility of our justice system has been undermined because our jails cannot guarantee that sentences will be served simply because they don’t have the room to hold all those convicted of crimes.

The same prevarication surrounds legislation promised to protect whistleblowers. The glacial pace of the investigation into our banking collapse long ago assumed the status of a national scandal. The same accusation can be made about establishing a mandatory national ID card system. The closure of about 100 Garda stations feeds into this sense of surrendering the high ground to those who care little or nothing for this society and its rules.

However, the greatest failure of all in the fight against crime is the endless delay — as delay infers the possibility, stasis might be a better word — around establishing a national DNA database. Such a facility is an everyday tool in the fight against crime in nearly every country that imagines itself up to speed in these matters. Almost eight years ago, the Law Reform Commission published a report recommending the establishment of a DNA database. However, it took six-and-a-half years before the Criminal Justice (Forensic Evidence and DNA Database System) Bill 2010 was published. It remains a proposal but if enacted it would facilitate samples being taken and retained from those suspected of serious crime.

Under European legislation, member states were obliged to, before Aug 2011, provide mechanisms for the exchange of DNA profile data. Many states delayed in providing for these exchanges but Ireland has not even legislated for the central element, a DNA database. This shows either scandalous ineptitude or scandalous indifference and means that those who would shoot our gardaí on sight or savagely beat old people in their homes for a few hundred euro need not worry about how one of the most effective technologies in fighting crime might be applied to them.

It would be a fitting tribute to the memory of Adrian Donohoe if all of us rejected the Pavlovian expressions of outrage from all politicians but rather insisted that they do what they were elected to do and enact legislation that will establish a national DNA database.

We’ve had enough empty talk.