I want to thank the Minister first of all for the close attention which he gave to contributions from this side of the House from Deputy Enright, Deputy Fitzpatrick and myself. I assure him that anything said was said with a spirit of constructive progress at heart. The Bill itself is long overdue and in many respects is a good Bill.
I do, however, have concerns which I am not going to deal with in detail about a number of aspects in the Bill. I say sincerely, because it does sum up some of the problems which we see relating to recent legislation in this House, that I am deeply disturbed not by just the cut-off point in section 5 but by the right the Minister is seeking and taking, uniquely, to my way of thinking, in section 25 whereby that cut-off point can be varied. I have always held that one of the hallmarks of a civilisation is the manner in which it provides access to justice for all people. Sections 5 and 25 do that concept an injustice. They do not provide justice for all. They provide justice for many, but they deliberately exclude some categories of people. Those categories, unfortunately, are likely to be people about whom it could be said they in a particular way need our supportive interest and the opportunity for the access which we talked about. In Irish society we see day in and day out instances where it is quite clear that the legal and judical system is not available to many people. It may be available theoretically in some cases but not in fact because it costs money or because it is not geographically properly located as in the context, for example, of the free legal aid scheme. In other words, without going into it in detail, there are many aspects in the judicial and legal system which we could point to as indicative of a system which helps those primarily in the upper socio-economic categories. They are as entitled to justice as anybody and I do not wish to be construed as implying anything else, but at the other end of the scale throughout Irish society over the years there has been a tendency to deprive these other categories, relatively speaking, of such access although often they are the people who are the objects of the attentions of the legal system in their role as defendants.
I am not suggesting that this scheme here is a major incursion in that respect, but it is a significant continuation of that thinking. For example, we see enshrined in legislation on this 2 April 1981 the theory once again that if you are a person on a certain rung of the ladder who has suffered loss, your loss, your status, your rights, your access are decreed to be inferior, by definition, to those of people on a different rung of the ladder who have other values and who are based in some other part of the socio-economic spectrum. I do not believe that that is the intent of this section but it is the effect of it. We may argue that the reason for this cut-off point is to eliminate a clutter of small and frivolous claims and I accept the integrity of that argument to some extent — although not the point itself — if it could be said that, therefore, some element of discretion was going to be introduced whereby in some circumstances at least a claim could be entertained from a person who was clearly in need of the money. If that discretionary power was there it would make some sense of the whole purpose. It would mean that those for whom in all honesty a loss of £30 or £40 was not great would not be cluttering up the courts with such claims. However, there are those for whom such claims up to £100 are very significant and important but they have no right whatever to be heard or to appeal, and that is a hallmark of this Bill which is reflected in sections 5, 10(2) and 25. Those three sections in themselves, contained as they are in this Bill, do a disservice to the idea of equality of access to justice for all people. In a section 10 case we find that the notion of justice contained in this Bill is based on the idea of property.
