Outstanding warrants: Justice backlog pushed back

As the old adage goes, justice delayed is justice denied.

A current application of this is the revelation that there were 115,000 outstanding warrants at the end of last month within the criminal justice system.

Fianna Fáil has made a major play of this, citing the force’s ageing Pulse system and cutbacks in the force as the main culprits for undermining its ability to execute warrants. The party’s justice spokesman, Niall Collins, wants Justice Minister Frances Fitzgerald to establish a Garda taskforce to deal with what he describes as “a growing number of outstanding warrants”. Mr Collins needs reminding that the number of outstanding warrants stood at 117,000 in 2008, when his party was in office, and has oscillated since.

A recent Garda Inspectorate report shows that, among the total number of outstanding warrants, a sizeable number were generated as a result of non-payment of fines.

One of the Government’s solutions for this is the Fines (Payment and Recovery) Act 2014, which is designed to effectively eliminate jail time for fine defaulters and allow judges to order the deduction at source from a person’s wages.

The trouble is that such a neat fix for two problems — number of warrants and an overcrowded prison system — could result in a garda backlog being replaced by a judicial one, as judges are unlikely to simply rubber-stamp applications for wage-deduction orders.