Criminal Law, Civil Law and Defence (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2026: Instruction to Committee Dail Éireann — 2026-06-10 ============================================================ Jim O'Callaghan (FF), Dublin Bay South One of the criticisms that is regularly made is that I am not getting things done and I am sitting on things, as the Deputies are all perfectly entitled and obliged to say to me if things are not being done. I know they are not asking me to, but I am not going to apologise for trying to get important measures that are of benefit to the public enacted as quickly as possible. I think we all agree that the disregard scheme, as everyone has said, is something that should have been done decades ago. I was not going to allow a situation to develop where I found myself, maybe in the third year of being Minister for justice, wondering whether I would get it over the line. I have driven it and I want to get it done. By the way, I appreciate all the contributions that Members in this House make. It is not the case that they have not scrutinised the matter or given me their views on these issues. In many respects, I have been listening to them for the length of time I have been Minister and I hear them all the time in terms of saying what they want to get done. I will deal with some of the other issues that were raised. The most important thing that was raised in respect of the disregard scheme was the issue about military law. Deputies Rice and Nash raised it. In the course of consultation on the drafting of this, there were significant legal concerns about including any case in which a person had been court-martialled for military misconduct. On careful consideration, I concluded that these offences could not appropriately be included. There were two principal difficulties. First, it would be legally questionable but also impracticable to attempt to determine whether a particular court martial was brought purely because of the homosexual nature of an act rather than because it involved a disciplinary infraction, such as abuse of rank, which would equally have been the case had the act been heterosexual in nature. Second, the relevant misconduct offences under the 1954 Act remain in force and, according to the Department of Defence, continue to be used today. Their inclusion will open the possibility of misconduct convictions right up to the present day and into the future being relitigated under a scheme intended to address an historical injustice. Equally, to impose a cut-off date, such as the 1993 decriminalisation, would almost certainly be challenged as arbitrary and unfair. For those reasons, I consider that the inclusion of these offences would not be legally or operationally viable. However, military convictions for the repealed offences of buggery, attempted buggery, gross indecency and importuning are within the scope of the scheme. The second point of principle, which was raised by Deputy Rice, was about including convictions prior to the establishment of the State. This country, this Government, has no responsibility for acts that were done prior to the declaration of the Irish Republic and our Independence. I cannot go back historically and start operating a disregard scheme because of the criminal justice system that operated in Ireland under the crown. I applied that in respect of the granting of pardons as well. It is a different country. This Republic is not responsible for what happened prior to our Independence. I very much welcome the discussion on this. I know there is a lot in the Bill. Everyone in this House wants to get these provisions enacted, not for the benefit of Deputies or Ministers or anyone else but for the benefit of members of the public, who all need to see this legislation enacted. --- 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/2026-06-10/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-09-28T05:50:47+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-06-10