Court Procedures Dail Éireann — 2026-05-14 ============================================================ Ruth Coppinger (PBP), Dublin West My question relates to character references. We have seen a spate of them recently from former TDs, many of whom seem to be hanging around the Fianna Fáil party. They do not have any understanding of how damaging this is to the victims of these crimes. Why are we still allowing character references from people who have absolutely no expertise in anything to do with any of these crimes? It is an outrage. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-05-14/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:56+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-05-14