The Workers' Party will not support the Bill which has been commended to the House by the Minister for the simple reason that it is wrong to commit a person to prison for the non-payment of a monetary fine. Any legislation seeking to improve existing law which stipulates that a person be incarcerated for the non-payment of a fine, should not be supported by the House.
I should like to outline briefly the reasons we hold this view. First, the reason people do not pay their fines, even when faced with the alternative sanction of imprisonment in Mountjoy or elsewhere, is poverty and inability to pay. There is no other reason. Anyone who suggests that there is a clever class of crook in our community who would much prefer to spend time in a so-called holiday camp — prison — than to pay a fine is not treating the issue with the seriousness it deserves. I do not believe any person should be sent to prison simply because they are poor. For this reason I argue that one is being heavy-handed, unfair and unjust in an enlightened society in using imprisonment as a sanction to force people to pay fines.
The second reason we oppose the idea that people should be incarcerated for the non-payment of a fine is that it does not make economic sense. I should like to quote some figures I elicited from the Minister for Justice for 1987. On 18 June 1987 the Minister advised me in the House that for the latest year for which figures were available, 1986, 1,006 people were committed to prison for the non-payment of fines. He went on to state that the average length of stay in prison was 40 days and that the average figure involved was £238. Therefore, 1,000 or more of our citizens were obliged to spend 40 days or thereabouts in prison because they could not raise the sum of a little over £200.
Let us examine the cost to the taxpayer. The Minister advised us in the Dáil in 1988 that the average cost in 1987 of detaining a person in prison was £28,000 which worked out at £540 per week. Therefore, it cost the taxpayer £3,600 to detain a person in prison for six weeks; in other words, to collect £238 from a person who had failed or refused to pay a fine we asked the taxpayer to spend in the region of £3,600. We have to presume, given that the average length of stay was 40 days, that the figure of £238 was not collected. Does any Member seriously suggest that this makes economic sense? Is the taxpayer getting any return for their money? Would the system of justice have fallen apart if those 1,006 persons had not been sent to prison for the non-payment of a fine? This would have made economic sense, resulted in a saving to the Exchequer and provided badly needed places in our prisons. I also believe that it would not have led to anarchy.
A third reason is that the Minister should rely on the fundamental document on penal reform, the Whitaker report, which has been available to him since 1985 and to which he has referred on occasion at great length in suggesting that he was taking on board its recommendations. What that report has to say on the question of the non-payment of fines has to be examined very carefully in the context of this legislation. It is stated succinctly at paragraph 5.15 of the report under the heading "Confiscation to Enforce Fines": "Confiscation should be the ultimate penalty, not imprisonment in default of payment of a fine". That is the clear view of the commission set up by the Government to investigate the penal system and make recommendations on how to improve it. That report has been before the Minister since 1985 but, regrettably, that recommendation has been ignored.
With regard to the escalating cost of detaining a person in prison, the Whitaker Commission argued that we should get away from the idea of using imprisonment as a sanction to collect fines. They recommended, with regard to motor offences, the area where most fines are imposed, that the motor car, the subject matter of the offence, should be impounded to extract the fine from the recalcitrant offender. That recommendation merits closer examination. At least it is an indication of the direction the Minister could take if he was concerned that the fines imposed were paid. There are other ideas — for example, the concept of community service as an alternative to imprisonment which could be used as a device to enforce the payment of fines. When fining people we could tell them that if they default on the payment of the fine for the offence they would be required to work in the community and to give public service. I have no doubt that in the case of many people in employment who have means and who have a certain amount of community pride this type of sanction as an alternative to the non-payment of a fine would be pressure enough to ensure that they would pay their fine. We could then deal with the very small number who are committed to prison for non payment of fines. Indeed, they are a very small percentage of the people who come before our courts, they numbered 1,006 in 1986, and I invite the Minister in his reply to tell us something of the statistical reality of the 1990 figures, if they are to hand, of those who were committed to prison for non payment of fines. I would like to know that number, I am using the figures for 1986 to illustrate the point I am making. When we have to decide what to do with the small number of offenders who will not pay their fines I think the community would be far better served and the taxpayer would get a far better return on his or her money by having the person put to some useful function or purpose or by restricting their movement in the community and by having them put some work back into it.
These ideas are not new and should not take the Minister by surprise: they are in the Whitaker report. I would have much preferred to see something along these lines tonight rather than this meagre legislation to tidy up a perceived difficulty. These are the three basic reasons that we are opposed strongly to the introduction of this legislation tonight. We would have preferred if the Minister had come before us with a realistic formula to deal with the non-payment of fines by offenders in circumstances where they refuse or simply cannot afford to do so.
As all Stages of the Bill are being taken tonight there will not be an opportunity to deal with matters in regard to the legislation after tonight. I have to ask why in 1991 we are still relying on legislation drafted in 1851 to deal with the administrative side of justice in this country. It is remarkable that when we spoke earlier about the administrative improvement of the courts and the Minister gave a fulsome commitment that we would be making progress in this area we are now brought back to the stark reality of where we are in this general area by realising that the fundamental legislation dealing with the whole question of the issue of warrants is to be found in an Act of the Imperial Parliament of 1851. Yet we have done nothing else in the legislative area in this regard other than to produce a one page Bill tonight to cover a loophole that some genius has uncovered.
In the interim period since the State was founded we have managed to draft rules of court in 1924 and in 1948. Where is the expertise and the overview of the workings of our courts for the past several decades and what has been happening in regard to updating all our court procedures and providing in the Department a coterie of experts to work on administrative improvements of the District Courts including the legislative basis and the rules and regulations to be drafted by the courts' procedural committees? When I was in practice and had to deal directly with the Department I remember trying to have the basic legal aid form — it runs to four pages and has to be filled up when one is claiming anything up to the princely sum of £30 for appearing in a District Court case — modified, but after six years of negotiations with the Department we still could not come up with a document that could work in something less than four pages.
There seems to be a fundamental problem in the Minister's remit in the Department of getting a dynamic group of people who can look quickly and succinctly at the administrative side of the courts, make recommendations and put forward serious propositions. In this regard a very fundamental issue arises from the wording of the legislation. The 1851 Act provided that the warrant should be issued directly upon the order being made for the payment of a fine when the period of time expired. I understand that in 1851 the Legislature at the time might have thought there was no great difficulty about doing this because there were many scriveners attached to the courts, there was not such a great volume of work to be done and the scrivener would deliver the warrant to the clerk to be signed by the justice within a matter of hours, if not sooner. What has happened is that the volume of work has increased and the scrivener side has decreased to the extent that now the rules decide that it would take six months for a clerk of the court to prepare a warrant for the district justice, to fill in the blanks in the standard form. The fact that the clerk of the court would need six months to do that is a reflection of two things. The first is that the administrative side has become antiquated because they were not provided with the facilities to keep up with the present workload. Surely in this day and age, when we are talking about the computerisation of the administrative work of the courts, it should take no more than pressing a key on a computer system to have the warrant issued there and then to be signed at the expiration of the court's business at the end of the day. In 1851 this could have been met, but we have moved into a period of chaos, out of which we should be able to move with the aid of computers. I believe it is utterly ridiculous to afford six months to the courts to issue a warrant arising from a specific date, be it the expiration of the time upon which the fine should have been paid or that the condition required has not been met. For what reason should we need a period of six months other than that the Minister recognises that the administrative side is in chaos. I accept that there is a huge volume of work, but surely we should not be accommodating chaos but introducing a system of computerisation and efficient administration that will not require such long periods to meet with the simple issuing and signing of warrants.
I want to query the Minister on section 1 (1) (a) (ii) and 1 (1) (b). Does the Minister consider that this amounts to a provision of retrospection with regard to penalties under the criminal code and has he consulted with the Attorney General's Office as to the constitutionality of these provisions? It seems to me that at the time an order of a penal nature is made in the court nothing can be done subsequently to interfere with the making of that order, the effect of that order and the capacity of that order to be implemented. The conditions that existed at the time the order was made are the conditions to be visited upon the offender for all time. The Minister is addressing the period 1 July to date in section 1 (1) (b) and is perhaps retroactively tidying up what was previously untidy but to the benefit of those who would be visited with a penal sanction. Is the Minister convinced that we are constitutionally sound in respect of that retroactive provision?
The Minister said he was motivated to bring forward this legislation on the basis that a doubt had been uncovered. This position had existed since 1924 without any question being raised or challenge being made. The Minister should have graciously indicated, at least in general terms, where the spark of genius was found which uncovered the doubt. Was it within the Department or was it by some attentive District Court clerk? Was it in the Attorney General's Office or elsewhere? Whoever it was deserves a certain pat on the back for uncovering what the entire legal profession have failed to uncover over decades. I can see some people close to us in the House who could have had a part in that but I am not entitled to say more.
On behalf of The Workers' Party, I recognise the administrative difficulties which have propelled the Minister to introduce this legislation. However, we have a fundamental opposition to the notion of incarcerating people who for reasons of poverty or disinclination fail to pay a fine. For that reason we will be opposing the Bill on Second Stage.