I move amendment No. 6:
In page 19, between lines 19 and 20, to insert the following section:
"(1) A person who consumes, or permits the consumption of, intoxicating liquor during prohibited hours in a refreshment house which is not a licensed premises shall be guilty of an offence under this section and shall be liable on summary conviction thereof to the fine to which he would have been liable if the conviction had been in relation to premises which, at the time of the commission of the offence, were licensed premises.
(2) In this section—
‘refreshment house' means premises, or any portion thereof, deemed for the purposes of the Refreshment Houses (Ireland) Act, 1860, to be a refreshment house;
‘licensed premises' and ‘prohibited hours' have the meanings they have in the Act of 1927."
In the course of the earlier debates, some Deputies—I think Deputy Sherwin, in particular—referred to the illegal sale of drink in certain late-night restaurants and cafés. It has come to my notice that detection of this illegality can be very difficult in certain cases. Where a wine licence is held— or, of course, a licence for the sale of intoxicating liquor generally—no special difficulty arises, since it is sufficient to prove the consumption of drink after hours on the premises Where, however, there is no licence at all for the sale of intoxicating liquor, there is a difficulty because in those cases, owing to what I can only describe as a loophole in the law, it is not sufficient to prove the consumption of drink on the premises after hours; the sale of the drink has to be proved and, needless to say, this can be extremely difficult. Patrons can be told to say, if found consuming liquor on the premises, that it was not sold by the proprietor but was brought in by the patrons themselves. Obviously the Garda would seldom be in a position to contradict that statement and the result is that a café or restaurant might carry on a shebeen trade with little danger of detection.
The amendment that I propose would make the after-hours consumption of intoxicating liquor in a refreshment House an offence. I ask the House to accept the amendment.
