Criminal Justice (International Cooperation on Electronic Evidence and Other Matters) Bill 2026: Committee and Remaining Stages
Seanad Éireann — 2026-07-07
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Chris Andrews (SF), Labour Panel

I move amendment No. 3:
In page 16, between lines 23 and 24, to insert the following:
“(4) Such an annual report shall contain statistical data in relation to—
(a) the number of orders which were notified to the Director,
(b) the number of orders that were refused,
(c) the number of agreements entered into with service providers under section 40(1) and the status thereof by category,
(d) the number of instances whereby a court confirmed, set aside, replaced, or remitted either the decision or financial penalty of an adjudicating officer,
(e) the number of instances whereby the Director failed to sanction or refuse an order within the required timeframe, and
(f) the whole-time equivalent allocation, by cost, by role,
including the data category requested, the addressees, the situation (emergency case or not), grounds for refusal by category, number of court appearances, by country of origin.”.
A significant concern raised on Dáil Committee Stage was the scale of the potential cost of the office. Deputies were not reassured by the officials. We know it is going to begin with a €2.8 million budget for this year, which will provide for 29 staff and associated costs. There are suggestions that staffing levels could reach upwards of 150. While the Department seems to think that the impact on the courts would be minimal, the Courts Service itself stated that limited data was available about the number of cases that may arise after commencement. Combined with the unknown outworkings of the Minister's reform to criminal legal aid and the EU Presidency putting pressure on the ability of gardaí to attend courts, who knows what type of backlog our courts will be facing after the summer?
Amendment No. 3 is intended, at the very least, to ensure that the Oireachtas has a full overview of the details, scale and volume of orders being processed in Ireland and the volume and associated cost being processed through this office. Similarly, amendment No. 6 seeks to ensure that the director is supplied with the bare minimum level of information required to understand the burden being placed on our SMEs as well as to identify any potential trends of abuse of process and make sure that we are not unintentionally supporting them.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2026-07-07/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:55:09+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-07-07