I should note at the beginning that the headline above is blatant editorialising on my part: In this video from Helen McEntee, bragging about four new laws she has recently passed, she does not label them as “utterly useless”. In fact, she seems very proud of them. Watch for yourself, and see if you think my characterization is unfair:
Here’s four new laws passed by Justice Minister @HMcEntee to build stronger, safer communities: pic.twitter.com/amDwXWygBQ
— Fine Gael (@FineGael) July 12, 2023
Three of those new laws relate to sentencing – specifically, they increase the maximum available sentence for crimes like conspiracy to murder or assault causing harm. The other creates a new stand alone offence for non-consensual sexual strangulation. We’ll deal with that one first.
Sexual assault is, of course, already illegal in Ireland. Non-consensual strangulation, even if it does not have a sexual component, is also already illegal, falling as it does under standard assault and battery legislation. To listen to the Minister, one might be forgiven for thinking that until she tackled the issue, it was perfectly legal to go around choking women. It was not. This is a law to criminalise the already illegal, and it provides no extra or additional resources to Gardai to make people safe from those who would strangle them. The specific benefit it provides to public safety is – charitably – unclear.
And yet it is clearer than the benefit of the new sentencing laws for the crimes she identifies in her other three new laws.
Let’s be clear: if these laws were to increase the minimum sentence for, say, assault, then they might have some benefit to them, because they would take away some judicial discretion to hand out suspended sentences for crimes that most people would agree warrant a term in prison. But that is not what any of those laws do: They simply increase the maximum sentence available to a judge in such cases.
This is presented by the Minister as “giving the Gardai the tools they need”.
Except that they do not give the Gardai any tools whatsoever: What they do is give the Judiciary tools which, the Judiciary make clear in their sentences every week, the Judiciary does not want and has no use for.
The Minister could, of course, give the Gardai tools. On that front, I was struck by this viral video, which did the rounds yesterday, of a Garda receiving assistance from a member of the public in confronting somebody who was behaving aggressively in central Dublin.
The notable thing for me in that video is that the Garda is alone, with no partner to support him. That’s before we get into the nature of the anti-social behaviour displayed in the video, or the outright and blatant lack of respect shown to the Garda and his uniform by the antagonist in the video. Such videos involving that kind of behaviour in Ireland’s capital city are, sadly, ten a penny.
Supporting the Gardai, and tackling crime, might start with a convincing increase in the size of the force. The state does not want for money at the moment, as we all know. And yet, under the wealthiest Government in Irish history, young members of the Gardai are being left to fend for themselves in an environment – central Dublin – where they are shamefully vulnerable. That is happening on Helen McEntee’s watch.
On this occasion, the young Garda was fortunate that members of the public decided to assist. It is not very long since in a similar incident in Ballyfermot where alienated members of the public joined in the assault, not the defence, of Gardai.
The Minister has no answer for any of that, nor, it seems, much interest in it.
Instead, we get various laws creating new crimes or modifying the sentences for old crimes. None of these things address the fundamental problem which is that in many communities, the existing crime levels are out of control. Or that the prisons are so full that Judges feel it necessary to release people wherever they possibly can, almost regardless of their crimes or how many previous convictions they’ve accumulated.
Getting crime in Ireland under control requires new prisons and more Gardai and probably, getting a handle on Judges and forcing them to sentence people appropriately. But this Minister for Justice has no interest in any of that. She is probably the least effective holder of that office in Irish history.