Criminal Justice (Terrorist Offences) (Amendment) Bill 2025: Committee Stage Seanad Éireann — 2026-06-30 ============================================================ Catherine Ardagh (FF), Dublin South-Central Apologies for my voice. Please bear with me. I thank the Senators for their amendments and contributions. Unfortunately, I cannot accept Senator O'Reilly's amendment No. 9. The directive, under Article 5, requires that the public provocation offence encompass direct and indirect incitement. An example of indirect incitement might be how to build a bomb or other publications. The amendments set down today seek to introduce various changes to section 3 of the Bill or to delete the proposed restructuring of this offence, as put forward in the Bill. Section 3 proposes a new form of words for the offence of public provocation to commit a terrorist offence in section 4A of the principal Act. As I said in my previous intervention, the Bill will improve and add additional safeguards to the public provocation offence in section 4A of the principal Act. I do not propose to repeat my earlier intervention but, for the reasons I have outlined already, I must oppose amendments Nos. 9 to 14, inclusive. I note that in her amendments Senator Higgins gets quite prescriptive in terms of what she is seeking to exclude. I understand that but sometimes when we are so prescriptive it can be counterintuitive. I would like the Senator to know that a huge amount of work has been put in by the Department to ensure these safeguards are adequate. As Senators know, these safeguards have already been back before the House to ensure they will have full effect and will stand the test to ensure the legislation is properly utilised with these important safeguards. I will now address amendment No. 19, proposed by Senator Higgins, which would amend the existing section 6(1)(a)(ii) of the principal Act. --- 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/2026-06-30/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:55:07+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-06-30