Criminal Law, Civil Law and Defence (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2026: From the Seanad Dail Éireann — 2026-07-15 ============================================================ Matt Carthy (SF), Cavan-Monaghan It is quite phenomenal that we are dealing with such a number of amendments from the Seanad. I reiterate a point I have made on every Stage of this Bill. Before the Minister gets overly sensitive, I absolutely accept that miscellaneous Bills have their place, particularly when we are dealing with minor technical matters or matters that are in some way related. There are important provisions in this legislation that I welcome. The extensive range of unrelated issues dealt with, without what I consider to be appropriate levels of scrutiny ,has done a huge disservice to many of the good aspects being dealt with in the legislation. The truth of the matter is that there are good provisions in this Bill that just did not get the level of scrutiny warranted. When this legislation is made law, major aspects of it will not have been dealt with during pre-legislative scrutiny and were only touched upon on Committee and Report Stages. A great deal of the debate on this Bill was taken up by the issue of counselling notes. It has been proven by that debate that this issue should have been a stand-alone matter. It rightly consumed most of the discussion on Committee and Report Stages. Yet we still did not have enough time to tease out amendments to improve what the Minister has in this Bill, including the more serious concern that these provisions will allow the practice of the defence of an alleged offender in sexual violence trials to continue to be able to seek the disclosure of counselling notes under the provision of the interests of justice. It is appropriate that we commend all those victims and survivors who engaged with us throughout the consideration of this Bill and who laid out in stark terms the impact of this practice. We will see in practice how curtailed it becomes as a result, but it has to be said that the manner in which this issue has been dealt with has compounded some of the trauma outlined. I know that many people had hoped that the Minister would, even at a later stage, introduce a full ban on the disclosure of counselling notes. There will be a huge amount of scrutiny. I hope that the Minister is right that, in reality, when it comes to the practice of the courts, we will actually see a fundamental change in their approach in dealing with this matter. In terms of the legislation, as well as the breadth of the issues covered in the Bill, the other problem is the number of amendments the Minister has introduced on every Stage on new and unrelated matters that just have not been discussed in this House at all and will not get discussed here because of guillotines being applied and the Minister refusing to allow the justice committee to deal with this legislation in an appropriate way. I know the Minister is eager and anxious to get laws passed, and, in one way, that is commendable. I do, however, have a fundamental problem with the whole notion of scrutiny having been thrown out. I must say that the additions in respect of aid to the civil power remain the most inexplicable, because this is a defence matter. It necessitated a change to the Title of the Bill, never mind anything else. It also necessitated the Minister for Defence appearing before the justice committee. I do not know how the said Minister deals with things in her own sectoral committee, but I have never seen a more ill-prepared Minister in the justice committee, or a Minister unable to answer what should have been basic questions that were put to her. --- 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/dail/2026-07-15/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-09-14T01:01:08+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-07-15