Up to five years ago, if you didn’t pay a fine imposed by a court, you went to jail. Maybe not for long, even for a few hours, but the punishment was inescapable. Not any longer. Seven years ago it was decided that the system was inappropriate and ineffective. Fine defaulters were not doing any real prison time, mainly due to overcrowding in jails. For some, being arrested by the gardai and then given “temporary release” from prison was a simple way to clear their debt. However, these fine defaulters accounted for about half of all prison committals each year. Freeing up that space would mean offenders who might be a danger to the community could be incarcerated for longer instead.
The Fines (Payment and Recovery) Act, which took effect in January 2016, was supposed to reform this system. With the aim of keeping fine defaulters out of prison, it introduced a number of alternatives to jail time. These included attachment orders, where the fine can be deducted from a person’s salary; recovery orders, where a receiver is appointed to recover the money; or a community service order, where the defaulter does unpaid work. The courts could still imprison a defaulter but only as a last resort.
Predictably, the number of prison committals soon fell, from 9,883 in 2015 to 861 in 2019, a drop of more than 90 per cent. Yet an odd thing happened: there was no comparable increase in the amount of fines being paid, nor was there a concomitant increase in the use of the alternative remedies. The reason for this soon became clear. With the threat of prison removed, people began to default on fines in greater numbers.
This was facilitated by a clause in the act which said that attachment or recovery orders could be handed down by a judge only if the defaulter was in court. “Where the defaulter does not attend,” a recent briefing note explained to Heather Humphreys, the justice minister, “the court is left with no option but to reschedule the hearing, or issue a bench warrant for arrest.” Soon, attendance levels at enforcement hearings dropped to as low as 10 per cent. In other words, nine out of ten defaulters never showed up in court.
This created an issue for An Garda Siochana, which was overwhelmed with thousands of bench warrants. By 2019 the garda commissioner complained of an “unsustainable administrative burden”, particularly in Dublin. Each warrant had to be manually entered into Pulse, the garda computer system. A person could have paid their fine by the time the information was entered, leading to a wrongful arrest. Meanwhile the proportion of fines being paid fell from 55 per cent of those imposed before the act to 35 per cent in 2019. By February only 28 per cent of fines imposed in 2020 had been paid.
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Eventually the government reached for that time-worn crutch for dealing with a crisis — the “departmental high level group”. By late last year it had finally got around to writing a “preliminary options paper” but none of the options seemed to appeal to the Courts Service, which had its own proposals.
In fact, many of the service’s ideas seem sensible. For example, it proposed that a fine for not buying a TV licence would be added to a person’s local property tax, which is collected by Revenue. Fines for illegal parking would be abolished to be replaced by countrywide clamping. Drivers with unpaid motoring fines would be unable to tax or sell their vehicles until the debt was paid. Overall, once a judge imposed a fine as a punishment, the courts would have no further role to play.
According to the briefing note, the Department of Justice is looking at reforms introduced in Scotland about 20 years ago. These moved the responsibility for collecting fines from the courts and police to a civilian service. Northern Ireland has done the same. It is high time the department took action to sort out the mess created by the defective Fines Act. It is unacceptable that fines handed down by courts can be so easily evaded, and makes a mockery of the criminal justice system. As Einstein reputedly said: “Nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced.”
Westminster playing hardball with EU keeps loyalists quiet
July has passed without any loyalist disturbances over the Brexit protocol or any marching season trouble worth mentioning in Northern Ireland. At the risk of tempting fate, it must be asked why the rowdy summer so many feared, predicted or promised has failed to materialise.
A large part of the explanation is unfashionable to admit. The Northern Ireland Office has spent months briefing loyalists that the British government will play hardball with the EU and deliver changes to the sea border. For the moment this does not appear to be another British betrayal in the making.
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Translating this into calm on the streets has involved dealing with the Loyalist Communities Council (LCC), representing the main loyalist paramilitary groups. It stopped the rioting that broke out over Easter by organising anti-protocol protests that have remained peaceful. It has been crucial to communicating official reassurance to loyalism. Revealingly, the LCC was still calling for the protocol to be amended long after every unionist party was demanding its abolition. The LCC held to this line until May, when stubborn statements from the European Commission left it feeling too exposed.
There is of course another explanation for a quiet summer: the risk of Brexit- related disorder was greatly exaggerated. Although it was reported that Easter’s rioting was caused by the protocol, in fact it was mainly sparked by the Bobby Storey funeral scandal. Loyalist leaders did not orchestrate or sanction the disturbances, according to the PSNI, but did stop them through the near comic device of calling for respect for the death of Prince Philip. The history of Northern Ireland shows it does not take many people to cause trouble, but it is not sitting on the powder keg of Brexit rage that Easter’s media coverage implied or that loyalists might like others to believe. Unionists do not like the protocol, but there is no evident revolt.
The EU paused legal action against the UK last week over alleged protocol breaches, saying it wanted to create the “necessary space” to examine British proposals for reducing sea border checks. This came just after the UK rejected EU proposals for reducing checks. So the EU blinked first, to the surprise of its supporters in Ireland. Now things get trickier. The UK government has no intention of scrapping the protocol. Its negotiating aim with Brussels is to reduce checks to workable levels to make the sea border a sustainable, permanent arrangement. Loyalists have been briefed on that too, and will realise it is the best likely outcome for unionism. They will need to know what the amendments are, which may not be clear for months, but that should keep everyone busy until the nights draw in.
Pain relief plan goes to pot
“Breaking Bad meets The Golden Girls” was how the trial of a Dublin pensioner for drugs offences was described by her defence counsel last week.
The legally blind 68-year-old woman claimed she grew the cannabis plants in her Tallaght home to make medicine for pain relief, but the crop had flourished and she ended up with more than she needed. Even though gardai found weighing scales in her home, the woman insisted she wasn’t selling the drug but rather processing it to extract the essential oils. Despite the judge’s plea that “perhaps we shouldn’t hear the entire process”, the accused, who was acquitted of having the drug for sale or supply, helpfully shared her recipe with the court: put leaves and stalks in a jar, add oil, place in saucepan of water, simmer, strain through a tea towel.
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At least in Breaking Bad the writers tweaked Walter White’s crystal meth recipe to make it impossible for home cooks to follow. The best advice remains, however, “don’t try this at home”.