Criminal Law, Civil Law and Defence (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2026: Committee Stage Seanad Éireann — 2026-06-24 ============================================================ Alice-Mary Higgins (IND), National University of Ireland The backward step I am seeing is in terms of the signal it sends to those who have campaigned and pressed so strongly for the prohibition and greater protection. They do not find the solutions that have been put forward to be adequate. They do not find them to have moved the dial sufficiently and in the same way that is needed. There are two very specific matters that the Minister has not addressed as regards our amendments Nos.18 and 19. If he could come back in on those, it would be useful. I understand that the interests of justice piece is something that might be used by the prosecution but what we are pushing for in amendments Nos. 18 and 19 is the idea that there would be a separate process when a person's own notes are being used. I would love if the Minister could address that issue. This was highlighted as a concern by the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre. It said that, despite the objections from survivors and front-line services, the Government was removing the waiver that had been in section 19A and was taking agency from persons in relation to their own information. That is an important issue. What this reminds of is the mother and baby homes and how important it was that people could own information. There is a difference. Potentially, there is an argument to be made on the side of both the prosecution and the defence whereby a person could choose a waiver in respect of their own counselling records, especially now as the Minister expands the provision to other relevant records, too. It could be lots of relevant records. This is especially true for persons who have undergone traumatic situations where to testify and bring evidence forward, they are able to point back exactly to the situations and the context. Someone could say "My records" about the relevant records that belong to them. This is where there is a bit of a difference. The Minister talks about balancing privacy and the right to a fair trial. I would say that there is a wider context of the question of fair trials for victims of violence. It is something the public do not have confidence in. It is not just about privacy. The Constitution provides for privacy, too, but there is also what we have under GDPR and other things, which is the idea of a person's information. It is not just privacy, but the idea of who owns people's information and their own story. Who owns what they have said to a councillor and their own medical records? Do they belong to a person? As such, should a person decide rather than the State saying that these are records that are out there and it will decide who it believes should be able to have access to their records? There is also the question of ownership of a person's record and story, which particularly matters to victims of sexual violence. We saw in the past that it mattered very much to victims of institutional violence. One of the things we were getting at - regardless of whether the Minister agrees with the framing of it, I would like his response to this point - was the idea that the person should be able to waive rather than there being a process where a person discloses their own records is something that could be challenged and pushed against. If the Minister had a separate regime in respect of persons using their own records, he would not need to put in that provision, which widens it past a fair trial or the interests of justice piece. Does he understand what I mean? Looking at the two together, he could take the approach of having a mechanism, which we did have in terms of the waiver - that is why this is a backward step from many perspectives - whereby victims of sexual violence could chose to allow their own records to be there rather than being able to apply for their records and their own story to potentially be considered in court. That is the difference. That is the piece that is a bit of a backward step. The Minister is also going through an extra hoop for people to see what someone talked about back in 2005 or 2006 in terms of their records. That is a different piece. If the Minister had, as the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre and others have suggested, allowed for that different mechanism for individuals' own counselling records to be introduced, then he would not have to have such a wider provision in terms of both the fair trial and the justice provision, potentially, as being two routes that would allow records to be used more broadly. Will the Minister comment on why we cannot have that idea of the separate regime in the use of a person's own records? --- 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/2026-06-24/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:55:06+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-06-24