Victims' rights in Ireland: influences, illusions and impacts

Following international trends victims of crime in Ireland have increasingly become a source of political, policy and to a lesser extent academic concern. Although it is assumed that the Irish victims’ rights movement is having a profound impact on the criminal justice system there are very few studies addressing this assumption or the genesis of the Irish movement. At the time a victims’ rights movement was established in Ireland there were movements already established in the U.S. and Britain. To determine which model Ireland followed, if any, in establishing its movement a comparative analysis of the emergence of the victims’ rights movements in these three common law jurisdictions was undertaken. This research examines possible victim policy transfer to test the transfer route perception that the victims’ movement began in the U.S., was transferred into Britain and then onto Ireland. At the same time that the victims’ rights movements were emerging in the U.S., Britain and Ireland, and asserting pressure on their national governments for beneficial changes for victims of crime, international organisations such as the U.N. and Council of Europe were being pressured by victims’ rights groups into introducing victim centered instruments of guidance and best practice for member states. Eventually the E.U. became involved and enacted a binding instrument in 2001. These victim centered instruments provide legal and service provision rights to Irish victims of crime, but they do not generate much academic interest. This research, in addition to providing a detailed account of the victim centered instruments, analyses the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights, and identifies and analyses the primary victim centered statutory modifications and case law in Ireland over the past three decades. Lastly, the current law and practices in Ireland are evaluated against Ireland’s obligations under international and E.U. law.

The broad-scale distribution and abundance of Scyphomedusae in Irish waters

Scyphomedusae are receiving increasing recognition as key components of marine ecosystems. However, information on their distribution and abundance beyond coastal waters is generally lacking. Organising access to such data is critical to effectively transpose findings from laboratory, mesocosm and small scale studies to the scale of ecological processes. These data are also required to identify the risks of detrimental impacts of jellyfish blooms on human activities. In Ireland, such risks raise concerns among the public, but foremost amongst the professionals of the aquaculture and fishing sectors. The present work looked at the opportunity to get access to new information on the distribution of jellyfish around Ireland mostly by using existing infrastructures and programmes. The analysis of bycatch data collected during the Irish groundfish surveys provided new insights into the distribution of Pelagia noctiluca over an area >160 000 km2, a scale never reached before in a region of the Northeast Atlantic (140 sampling stations). Similarly, 4 years of data collected during the Irish Sea juvenile gadoid fish survey provided the first spatially, explicit, information on the abundance of Aurelia aurita and Cyanea spp. (Cyanea capillata and Cyanea lamarckii) throughout the Irish Sea (> 200 sampling events). In addition, the use of ships of opportunity allowed repeated samplings (N = 37) of an >100 km long transect between Dublin (Ireland) and Holyhead (Wales, UK), therefore providing two years of seasonal monitoring of the occurrence of scyphomedusae in that region. Finally, in order to inform the movements of C. capillata in an area where many negative interactions with bathers occur, the horizontal and vertical movements of 5 individual C. capillata were investigated through acoustic tracking.

Police accountability in Ireland: an analysis of the problems posed by the legal, constitutional and political dimensions and how they might be addressed

The concept of police accountability is not susceptible to a universal or concise definition. In the context of this thesis it is treated as embracing two fundamental components. First, it entails an arrangement whereby an individual, a minority and the whole community have the opportunity to participate meaningfully in the formulation of the principles and policies governing police operations. Second, it presupposes that those who have suffered as victims of unacceptable police behaviour should have an effective remedy. These ingredients, however, cannot operate in a vacuum. They must find an accommodation with the equally vital requirement that the burden of accountability should not be so demanding that the delivery of an effective police service is fatally impaired. While much of the current debate on police accountability in Britain and the USA revolves around the issue of where the balance should be struck in this accommodation, Ireland lacks the very foundation for such a debate as it suffers from a serious deficit in research and writing on police generally. This thesis aims to fill that gap by laying the foundations for an informed debate on police accountability and related aspects of police in Ireland. Broadly speaking the thesis contains three major interrelated components. The first is concerned with the concept of police in Ireland and the legal, constitutional and political context in which it operates. This reveals that although the Garda Siochana is established as a national force the legal prescriptions concerning its role and governance are very vague. Although a similar legislative format in Britain, and elsewhere, have been interpreted as conferring operational autonomy on the police it has not stopped successive Irish governments from exercising close control over the police. The second component analyses the structure and operation of the traditional police accountability mechanisms in Ireland; namely the law and the democratic process. It concludes that some basic aspects of the peculiar legal, constitutional and political structures of policing seriously undermine their capacity to deliver effective police accountability. In the case of the law, for example, the status of, and the broad discretion vested in, each individual member of the force ensure that the traditional legal actions cannot always provide redress where individuals or collective groups feel victimised. In the case of the democratic process the integration of the police into the excessively centralised system of executive government, coupled with the refusal of the Minister for Justice to accept responsibility for operational matters, project a barrier between the police and their accountability to the public. The third component details proposals on how the current structures of police accountability in Ireland can be strengthened without interfering with the fundamentals of the law, the democratic process or the legal and constitutional status of the police. The key elements in these proposals are the establishment of an independent administrative procedure for handling citizen complaints against the police and the establishment of a network of local police-community liaison councils throughout the country coupled with a centralised parliamentary committee on the police. While these proposals are analysed from the perspective of maximising the degree of police accountability to the public they also take into account the need to ensure that the police capacity to deliver an effective police service is not unduly impaired as a result.

Cash or non-cash: that is the question - the story of e-payment for social welfare in Ireland part 2

E-Government in its various forms and extensions, notably T-Government, is often presented as the panacea for resolving such complex social problems as social exclusion, lack of governance transparency, poor value for money and other ailments of modern societies. Yet, E-Government has not been adopted up to predicted levels. Many case studies investigating success factors, maturity models, and the application of acceptance models have been presented over the last 15 years, but a deep understanding of the potential impact and consequences of E-Government is still lacking. This is especially true for those initiatives that involve socio-economic and cultural contexts, which makes their evaluation and the prediction of their impact difficult. This paper reports on an on-going E-Government initiative in Ireland aimed at implementing E-payments for G2C, notably in the social welfare area. Three sets of personal surveys have been carried out to understand the perceived impact of governmental plans of moving from an almost fully cash-based payment system to a fully electronic based solution. Early results indicate that perceived pre-requisites for the planned change may be misleading. The impact on recipients’ lives cannot solely be measured in terms of economic gains: the consequences of such implementation may well reach further than expected.