(Cavan): Before reporting progress on Tuesday night, I had moved this amendment, the effect of which is to delete section 64 of the Bill. The object of section 64 is to amend section 103 of the Road Traffic Act, 1961, by conferring on lay persons, to be known as authorised officers, the powers conferred on members of the Garda Síochána by section 103 of the Principal Act. It is therefore no harm, very briefly, to point out what, in fact, section 103 of the Principal Act does.
Section 103 is the section which confers on members of the Garda the right to impose on-the-spot fines. As we know, to date, on-the-spot-fines have been imposed only in respect of parking offences. We must not lose sight of the fact that section 103 of the Principal Act may be applied to such offences as the Minister by order directs because subsection (1) of that section reads:
This section applies to such offences under this Act as may be declared by the Minister by regulations to be offences to which this section applies.
I am against the proposal contained in section 64 of the Bill with which we are now dealing, to extend the powers contained in section 103 to authorised officers who are to be recruited by the Commissioner of the Garda Síochána in an informal way, who will not have any police training. I say they are being recruited in an informal way for the reason that section 64 of the Bill, which my amendment proposes to delete, specifically says that neither the Civil Service Commissioners Act, 1956, nor the Civil Service (Regulation) Act, 1956, shall apply to the situation of an authorised officer for the purposes of section 103 of the Principal Act. I consider that highly undesirable.
Subsection (1) of section 64 says inter alia,
In this section "authorised person" means a person appointed by the Commissioner to be an authorised person for the purposes of this section.
As we know, members of the Garda Síochána are recruited as a result of open competitive examination conducted by the Civil Service Commissioners; they are subject to an interview and to medical examination and they undergo a course of training before being entrusted with police duties. Here we are going to depart from that procedure which has given such satisfaction down the years and are going to let loose on the city of Dublin, and presumably on the rest of Ireland, a number of persons to be known as authorised officers and who are to be recruited in the informal way which I have described, a way which will not be subject to the Civil Service Commissioners Act, 1956, and the Civil Service (Regulation) Act, 1956. That is undesirable.
Let us be clear about this. The people we are thinking of appointing now are not traffic wardens whose duty it is to assist schoolchildren on their way to school. There seemed to be some confusion about that on Committee Stage. That is not the type of authorised officer we are dealing with. We are going to hand over to these people such regulations as may be entrusted to them by the Minister under the powers vested in him by section 103 of the Principal Act. The Minister's explanation on Committee Stage for the informality proposed in relation to these appointments was that these would be part-time appointees. I think he went on to say that they would be part-time persons paid a small salary or small wage. I said then, and I say now, that I do not think it desirable to entrust police duties to persons employed on a part-time temporary basis. It is police duties we are entrusting them with here. It may very well be that these people will consider that they will have to render a good account of themselves, that they will have to make a good number of detections, and that they will have rigidly and maybe ruthlessly to discharge the duties entrusted to them so that they will be retained in their positions. That is highly undesirable.
If the Minister is considering the delegation of police duties to people other than properly recruited and adequately trained policemen, then the least he should do is to see that these people are properly recruited and that they have some fixity of tenure. I can see this leading to a most undesirable state of affairs. I think the Minister on Committee Stage said also that these people could not direct a prosecution, but the fact of the matter is that they will be prosecution witnesses and, having reported a person for a breach of the Road Traffic Acts, will be very anxious to sustain a conviction. Human nature being what it is, they will be all the more anxious to sustain a conviction because they will be purely part-time, temporary officers and at the whim of the Commissioner of the Garda Síochána or the Minister for Justice and may be hired and sacked at will.
I do not know if we are following a precedent established elsewhere. If we are, it is a bad one. If we are not following a cross-Channel precedent, we are creating a very bad precedent here. I do not know what the Minister will say at this stage in justification of his proposal, but I affirm that section 103 of the Road Traffic Act, 1961, extends much further than the provision of traffic wardens. If the Minister intends to confine the duties of these authorised officers to a limited category of offences, then he should alter section 103 accordingly and state that specifically. But I will go further and say that to entrust to these part-time people, employed in this highly undesirable way, any form of police duties, even the duties of regulating parking, is going too far, is departing from the well-established practice here down through the years whereby these functions were discharged only by members of the Garda.
I am opposed violently to the proposal because it is wrong and I think that the method of recruitment is highly undesirable. If we are to get people to work for small wages, I think the result will be we shall not get good service and that we shall have abuses. For that reason, I propose the deletion of section 64 which, in effect, means that section 103 of the 1961 Act stands as it is and that the system of spot fines will remain, but that the people who will operate under section 103 will continue to be trained and respected members of the Garda, subject to the provision for recruiting them which now exists and subject to the fixity of tenure which they now enjoy and to the strict code of discipline operated within that force.