Garda Síochána (Powers) Bill 2026: Committee Stage (Resumed)
Seanad Éireann — 2026-05-26
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Michael McDowell (IND), National University of Ireland

The Minister said that the offences in the Schedule are all serious offences, and many of them are, but if he looks at paragraph 14 of the Schedule of offences he will see it states that any "offence under section 4 ... of the Criminal Justice (Theft and Fraud Offences) Act 2001" is an offence for the purposes of the Act. When I look at section 4 of the 2001 Act, I discover that any offence of theft is covered by the Schedule. It is not all at the level of murder or anything else. That is the first point I want to make.
Second, it is all very well to provide, for journalists' places of business, places of residence or whatever, that a search warrant cannot be applied for without incurring the obligation to inform the District Court, at the time the warrant is applied for, that there is a potential privilege issue. That is a necessary protection but I go back to the point I made to the Minister on instances where there is no search warrant required. Where there is a stop-and-search power deployed, there is no premises involved at all. The whole warrant procedure and the obligations, which are rightly being provided for in this legislation, simply have no application. What happens then? If a member of An Garda Síochána stops a journalist and seizes his notebook in his car, what happens then? No warrant is involved. No obligation to tell any District Court judge anything is activated by this necessary legislation in respect of search warrants. However, we are now saying that any garda can stop any car in which he believes there is any evidence of the commission of a theft and he can seize anything in that car without any protection for journalistic privilege of any kind whatsoever.
This is not pedantic or theoretical. If a member of An Garda Síochána has a choice between stopping a journalist's car and finding material in it which is evidential of the crime of theft or, alternatively, waiting until the journalist gets home and applying to a District Court judge, with an elaborate protection procedure for the journalist's recognised rights of qualified privilege, why would the garda not stop his or her car? Why would they not do that give that this legislation allows them to do that?

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2026-05-26/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:59+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-05-26