Garda Síochána (Powers) Bill 2026: Committee Stage (Resumed)
Seanad Éireann — 2026-05-26
============================================================

Michael McDowell (IND), National University of Ireland

I do not see anything fanciful at all about a member of An Garda Síochána, who knows there is evidence in a car relating to the commission of an offence, stopping and searching that car and looking at the evidence. I do not think there is anything fanciful about that. Section 4 the theft Act is so wide it could deal with somebody who stole from their employer or stole from their place of work. Evidence relating to that could consist of photocopies of documents in the possession of a journalist. I am not against the Minister's proposals. I am saying that we should look at what is available to a journalist by way of protection if a member of An Garda Síochána decides to invoke the stop and search powers, as opposed to going to a District Court judge and getting a warrant to stop and search the journalist or the journalist's car with a view to gaining access to evidence.
I will give an example. Let us suppose there is a non-digital camera sitting in the back of a car, or a photocopied document that is suspected by the Garda to be the kind of material that will give it the lead they need in an investigation, and it suspects it is most likely in the possession of a journalist who they have seen talking to somebody who knows something about a case. What protections are we putting in place for a journalist to say, "No. You cannot search the file in the back of my car or the notebook I keep as a journalist to see who I was speaking to in such and such a pub down the road". We are not doing that in this legislation but we are doing it in the case of a garda who thinks that the journalist's notebook is back at home in his or her house. In those circumstances, we are saying that a District Court judge has to be warned, all of the assessments and all the rest of it come into play, and the protections for the journalist come into play. Apart from saying that there is something "unlikely" about the scenario I am outlining, I am not hearing the Minister saying what the consequences would be.
I do not regard it as in any way demonstrated in Irish law that a prosecution would be stopped because a garda had at some point, in order to give himself or herself a good indication of who the offender was, seized a journalist's papers. I do not see there being anything unlikely about that.
I fully support what the Minister is saying about electronic devices, the protections and the situation that arose in the Emmett Corcoran case. I fully understand that that needs to be addressed. I am making a different point. I am saying that we are introducing stop-and-search powers for any offence of theft of any kind whatsoever and there is no protection at all for journalists in that context. There is no protection whatever that corresponds to a search of a journalist's home, office or workplace. Why should the situation be dramatically different relating to a journalist's home or workplace, on the one hand, and, on the other, a journalist in a car on the public highway? Why should there be such a two-tiered approach to the protections available to journalists? That is the point I am making.

---

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/seanad/2026-05-26/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:59+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-05-26