Some thoughtful and considered arguments have been advanced in opposition to the Government's proposed amendment on bail. There are other measures which can be taken to shorten the trial process. Sanctions for breaches of bail are seldom enforced. The prisons are overcrowded and planned extensions will not be sufficient to meet additional demands. And the State's approach to crime is ad hoc and reactive. There is no research and nothing that could plausibly be described as a policy framework.
But some ill founded rhetoric has also been put up against the proposal. There is an element of reaction against the vote catching, quick fix approach of the politicians. Cynicism is not difficult to understand. But it must not cause us to set aside the entitlement of citizens to effective protection under the law, to freedom from violence and to peace and bodily integrity.
There is nothing draconian about what is proposed. It applies in every other State - even in the liberal Nordic democracies. It is in conformity with the European Convention on Human Rights. Nor does it presume guilt before trial. Irish law already allows for detention before trial where there is a danger of interference with witnesses or that the accused may not turn up. Nobody challenges these provisions as tantamount to internment or a presumption of guilt. Yet they are applied with regularity in the courts.
Would the amendment reduce crime? It may not be all that important to reduce the numbers of larcenies, for example. And some of those who are opposed to the amendment are correct when they argue that more speedy trials, the implementation of consecutive sentences and the estreatment of bail when broken, would probably do more to get the overall crime figures down.
What the amendment would do, however, is to reduce the numbers of serious and violent crimes, especially robberies and, to some extent, assaults including sexual assault. It would reduce the threats to life and limb represented by the professional, organised drug pushers, the gangs which specialise in aggravated burglary and car theft - those who make a living from crime and who walk free from the remand courts to continue their criminal avocations pending trial. There is a good chance that any unfortunate citizen who finds himself staring down the barrel of a shotgun this weekend will be the victim of an assailant or assailants who have already been apprehended by the Garda, charged and turned out on the streets on bail.
Our liberal bail laws benefit - if that is the word - many relatively harmless offenders. Perhaps we might elect to live with that. But those same laws are the daily joy and celebration of the hard core, violent criminals who will scarcely hesitate to take life in pursuit of their objectives. No State should ask its citizens or its law enforcement officers to be victimised by those who have been apprehended in the act, often at great physical risk, only to be turned free pending trial.
The undeserving beneficiaries of our bail laws are the professional criminals, the gunmen, the predators upon the weak and the vulnerable. That the bail laws have to be changed in order to confront these elements was the clearest view of the late Veronica Guerin whose death, in great part, led to the present series of initiatives on crime. The proposed amendment is a reasonable measure. It does not represent some fundamental breaching of civil liberties or human rights - and some of those who throw around such heavy calibre terms in the context of this debate ought to know better. It should be passed into law. And the political pressure must be maintained simultaneously to address the basics of our criminal justice shambles.