It has emerged that a total of 250 convictions have been secured for offences committed under the Harassment/Stalking sections of the Non-Fatal Offences Against the Person Act 1997 for the years 2015 to 2021. The convictions during this timeframe applied to 233 people.
The relevant section, (10 (1)), of the Non-Fatal Offences Against the Person Act 1997 states that any person who, without lawful authority or reasonable excuse, by any means including by use of the telephone, harasses another by persistently following, watching, pestering, besetting or communicating with him or her, shall be guilty of an offence.
The information on the conviction rates was provided to the Independent TD for Laois Offaly Carol Nolan in response to a parliamentary question she submitted on the matter to the Minister for Justice, Helen McEntee.
On 21 April Minister McEntee announced that she had secured Government approval to draft new legislation to make stalking a standalone offence as part of the Government’s approach to domestic, sexual and gender-based violence.
This was despite the fact that Minister McEntee had accepted in her announcement that stalking was already a crime with offences under the existing 1997 Act carrying a potential sentence of up to 7 years imprisonment.
Minister McEntee also stated that perpetrators of stalking “should not imagine they can act with impunity.”
However, the data that has now been confirmed would suggest that the courts and the legal system are not permitting people to act with impunity with convictions rising from 28 in 2015 to a high point of 51 in 2019.
Commenting on the reply she received from Minister McEntee, Deputy Nolan said that her priority as a legislator was to ensure “that the Dáil makes the best use of its time and resources to enact meaningful protections for women and men subjected to the trauma of stalking or harassment.”
The Independent TD who is also a member of the Dáil Rural Independent Group went on to state that “to do that we must avoid duplicating existing legislation. It would be far better to concentrate on providing resources to Gardai that would enable them to respond in a more timely and effective manner to any complaints they receive from people who feel they are being stalked or harassed in the manner laid out in the 1997 Act.”
Although supporters of the new stand-alone law had hoped that the offence could be on the statute books before the Dáil’s summer recess, it has since emerged that no Bill that would give effect to this has been placed on the Governments list of Priority Legislation which was published after Minister McEntee made her announcement.
The response from Minister McEntee also showed that there was a total of 6,216 convictions for the offence of assault during the timeframe covered by the parliamentary question.