NORA Owen should be in even greater trouble than she is. She is the prime perpetrator of the most questionable piece of political cynicism to be visited upon an innocent Irish public in a long time: the bail referendum.
The most vivid illustration of such cynicism is the revelation that she, her Department (if it can any longer be described as "her" Department) and the Garda have treated the bail issue with rank indifference for years and still do.
If bail were such a crucial issue, one would expect that the Department of Just ice and the Garda would be hugely interested in and concerned with the incidence of breaking bail: failing to turn up for trial, having been given bail. One might expect this to be all the more so given that, "failure to answer bail" is an offence under Section 13 of the Criminal Justice Act 1984 and, in addition, this offence is treated as an offence committed while on bail for the purpose of Section 11 of the Act, which provides for consecutive sentencing for offences committed while on bail.
The only regular source of information on crime is the annual report of the Garda Siochana. This sets out the number of offences committed under a large number of headings, from serious crimes such as murder, rape, and armed robbery to what is known as "non-indictable offences". The categories include crimes such as urinating in a public place (five offences in 1995); breach of the peace (176); intoxication in a public place (59); not wearing a seat belt (6,371); dangerous parking (219); refusing to give a preliminary specimen of breath (128); being in charge of a vehicle with defective tyres (5,641); being illegally on a licensed premises during closing hours (7,381), and drunkenness (1,380).
The 1995 annual report of the Garda Siochana is a fine publication: magnificent charts and graphs, colour photographs of gardai smiling or looking sombrely at computer screens, a lovely photograph of the Garda Band, a photograph of the arm of a fellow doing something to a map, and in the very brief section on information technology, a photograph of a garda with a mobile phone in one hand and a laptop in the other. It must have cost £30,000-plus to produce the report.
But, if you search high and low throughout the 76 glossy pages, there's not a single mention of the crime "failure to answer bail".
LAST Monday, I put a query to the Department of Justice: what was the number of crimes committed under the "fail to answer bail" heading? It hadn't the remotest idea, and neither did the Garda Press Office.
You might think this doesn't matter so long as the Garda is out there day and night trying to catch those who have committed the crime while on bail or "failing to answer bail", as well, no doubt, as committing a wide range of other crimes while on bail. Surely, given the Government's, the Minister's, the Dail's and the public's agitation over the phenomenon of rampant crime being committed by persons on bail, this is the least we might expect?
Sadly, no.
The Garda acknowledges it has no means of even knowing who has failed to meet bail because, although bench warrants are issued, the only gardai who would know about this would be the individual gardai involved in the case and anyone else they might happen to mention it to. "Word of mouth", I was informed, was the only means whereby gardai not directly involved would be aware that someone had jumped bail.
How then, even if the person who has jumped bail was arrested on other crimes, would that person also be charged with failing to meet bail? Well, that too would depend on whether the garda who arrested them on the new charge happened to be aware that the person had jumped bail previously.
Either there is a serious problem with the commission of crimes while on bail or there is not. If it is a serious problem, how is it that the Garda and the Department of Justice do not bother to compile easily obtainable information on the number of people who fail to meet bail each year? Why is it not even given a category in the Garda annual report?
Also, if crime committed on bail is a serious issue, why is it that the Garda does not bother to disseminate the most basic information throughout the force on those who have failed to meet bail?
If there is not a serious problem on crime committed by persons on bail, why are we having a referendum to change the Constitution on the issue?
HE new Garda Commissioner, Pat Byrne, was on radio on Monday last talking about "statistics being bandied about" concerning crimes committed by persons on bail. He referred to the figure of 5,440 that is often mentioned and said this was the minimum figure of crimes committed by persons on bail.
This figure is bandied about by no less an authority than the Garda annual report of 1995. On page 75 of that report, just beside another photograph of the fellow's arm doing something to a map, is a beautifully coloured chart headed "Offences committed by persons on bail". This shows the figure for 1995 of 5,440. There are no caveats offered regarding this figure, no warnings about bandying about this figure. There it is, take it or leave it.
Yet we assume (although the report doesn't say this) that this figure represents the number of offences detected as having been committed by persons on bail and, let us accept, that the actual number of offences committed by these people is very much higher - say three times as high.
But wouldn't whichever figure you use be far smaller if the Garda was even minimally efficient in seeking to arrest those who have broken bail - people whom they know have committed at least one crime while on bail and, very likely, many more? Indeed, if this were done would the issue of a constitutional change in the bail laws even arise?
This is one of the easy ways of dealing with the "problem" of crime committed by persons on bail. The other obvious ways of dealing with it are a simple legislative change - long promised but, characteristically, not acted on - to require consecutive sentencing for crimes committed while on bail, reducing the time between the making of charges and the trial of the action (the recent Denham Report showed that there were delays between two months and six years in returns for trial in the Central Criminal Court), plus dealing seriously with the drugs problem.
But none of these measures has quite the macho glamour of "grasping the nettle" of constitutional change on bail. And so what if this grasping the nettle constitutes "a badge of an oppressive and unjust system", in the words of the revered former Chief Justice, Thomas Finlay?