Criminal Law, Civil Law and Defence (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2026: Second Stage Seanad Éireann — 2026-06-18 ============================================================ Michael McDowell (IND), National University of Ireland I welcome the Minister here today. I indicate my support in general for this Bill and for the initiative the Minister is taking in proposing a Bill with a diverse category of miscellaneous provisions in it. I agree with him completely that it is difficult to organise legislative time and difficult to get measures through the Attorney General's office and the parliamentary draftsman’s office. If everything is done in a segmented way as the Minister implied, a lot of worthwhile initiatives will be postponed or never addressed even when there would be in general terms a consensus right across the political spectrum that the amendments or the provisions of the Bill or similar Bills are desirable. The Bill is a comprehensive Bill and cannot be rushed through. Some of the individual components are non-controversial and I presume will not cause any significant delay. However, in respect of some items, for instance the provisions in relation to the cancellation effectively as a matter of law of homosexual convictions, need to be looked at quite carefully indeed. Putting in place a specific power in the Defence Act covering acting in aid of the civil power is a very wise provision. As somebody who actually in my time did act in aid of the civil power a long time ago, I often wondered precisely what the authority was for my deployment, sitting in a ditch on the Concession Road along the Border with a with a machine gun in my hand and gardaí carrying out road checks on vehicles and passengers. I wondered precisely what our rights were in the circumstance. We believed that we were there to protect the gardaí and to use our weapons to protect their lives if necessary but it was not very clear to us what would happen if any of us inflicted injury on somebody else in this context. In respect of aid of the civil power, subsection 5 of the new section 40B refers to assistance provided by the Defence Forces to An Garda Síochána under this section. That possibly could be widened to the Prison Service. I am thinking back to Portlaoise and to occasions when there was a threat of industrial action in the Prison Service which could have given rise to a State emergency. When I was Minister, we had the Defence Forces carry out surveys of the prisons with a view to ensuring the safety of the State. That is something that could be looked at. I also believe that the protection of military installations provision is very important. If people invade an Army barracks, what force can be used to repel them? This at least sets out a test that as long as the force used to defend the security facility is reasonable, proportionate and necessary, it is lawful. I am glad to see that kind of provision being expressly stated. One thing I would say to the Minister about legislation of this kind is that because it is so miscellaneous in its character, it is important that the process of reflecting its contents in restatements of statutes is carried out because otherwise you will be looking at what appear to be complete statutes and you will not know that a change was made to that statute in Part 12 of this Bill. Whereas I welcome the idea of miscellaneous provisions Bills, they have to be, in my view, married to transparency in the Statute Book by means of ensuring that anybody who looks up the revised statutes will find an appropriate reference to the changes that were made here. I could spend time talking about the individual portions of it but I will not do that. I will raise one matter with the Minister, and that is that a lot of what is going on at the moment in terms of registers and the like presupposes that people are easily identified. I was checking up today on the method of changing your name by deed poll and I would invite Members of this House to look at the register of deed poll activity. It is quite substantial. Some of it seems to be people changing their names to reflect their gender status change under gender recognition legislation but others are mildly surprising. If the Minister is to have protection for victims of domestic violence and registration of those people, a lot of the good involved in that is cleared away if somebody can simply change their name and bash on. It occurred to me, for instance, that to change your name by deed poll, you should at least give your address. In the register, your address does not appear and if Seán Power becomes Seán McMahon, nobody knows where that person is. He could be in Donegal. He could be in Wexford. Nobody knows who that person is. That is a point. Another issue the Minister should think about, and maybe it is for another miscellaneous provisions Bill, is, where people have been convicted of offences, to make it a requirement that the deed poll provisions are controlled to some extent in that at least there is notification to the authorities and some notification on the register, especially in the case of people who have been the subject of recent convictions that they do not simply change their name and walk off into the sunshine as if nothing had happened. Those are merely some reflections I have. I welcome the legislation and I look forward to adequate time being given on Committee Stage to each of the pieces because a lot of people would say there is nothing controversial in this Bill but there are things which need to be carefully looked at to see whether they will have the effect that the draftsman and the Minister intend and that the House would intend in approving them. From that point of view, there is no rush with this. I am not suggesting that we should delay it in any way but I would like the opportunity, for instance, to look at some of the provisions relating to disregarding convictions to see whether they will work. I notice, for instance, that somebody who gets a disregard procedure in their favour is not required, as a matter of any requirement of any foreign government, to disclose that conviction, which is fine. That is a good idea, but how do the Americans, for instance, deal with that? It is a question. I wonder are they on-side, so to speak, with somebody simply saying that they have never been convicted of a serious offence. Have we the understanding that you could not be dumped out of America for lying even though the Irish law seems to say you can tell the Americans you have no conviction? It is a point I would like to have explored. I welcome the Minister, I commend him on his activity and industry, and look forward to this Bill being properly considered. --- 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/2026-06-18/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:55:05+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-06-18