Sir, I refer to Vincent Browne's article in The Irish Times (May 29th) on the subject of bail which I discussed with him on a 98FM programme. There are serious inaccuracies in the article, the first of which concerns that radio show. In actual fact, when Vincent Browne asked me what the bail figures were, I answered accurately, without a plethora of statistical tomes in front of me, and he suggests that I did not.
The purpose of the newspaper article was to criticise me for failing to take issue with the Minister for Justice following her announcement that she intended to bring forward proposals for the restriction of bail in certain circumstances and, in particular, where the accused person was likely to re offend if granted.
Fianna Fail has its own proposals on this issue, which will be published in due course. However, the essence of the point being made by Vincent Browne is that such proposals are wholly unnecessary and disproportionate to the perceived problem of crime being committed by persons on bail. He attempts to support his proposition by reference to the figures contained in Table 13 on page 36 of the Law Reform Commission Report, which gives the breakdown of crimes committed in 1993.
He recommends that I should take a 37 second flick through the report. Having carefully examined the Report on its publication, I must inform Mr Browne that his analysis of the figures is fundamentally flawed and the conclusions drawn completely erroneous.
Throughout his article he has compared all crimes committed (acknowledged in the report as on detected) with the number of crimes found to have been committed by persons on bail, i.e. by definition, detected crimes. By comparing undetected with detected crime figures he fails to compare like with like. Approximately 33 per cent of all crime in 1993 was detected.
The remaining 67 per cent remained undetected, some of which may have been committed by persons while on bail. For example, when Mr Browne says that "a tiny proportion of the serious crimes that year were committed by persons on bail" he gives the example of eight armed robberies out of a total of 128. Of that 128 reported armed robberies in 1993 only 30 were detected by the Gardai i.e. only 23 per cent. Consequently, more than one in four of detected armed robberies in 1993 were committed by persons on bail.
If 30 armed robberies were detected by the Gardai out of a total of 128, it follows that 98 were undetected. It is not possible to know the exact figure. Applying the four to one proportion already referred to, it is not unreasonable to conclude that up to a further 25 armed robberies may have been committed by persons while on bail, which remained undetected.
So the correct comparison is that eight out of 30 detected armed robberies were committed by persons while on bail, or up to 32, out of 128 undetected armed robberies, may have been committed by persons while on bail. Either way the proportion is the same, i.e. one in four.
The same analysis can be applied to the other categories of crime in Table B of the Report. For instance, at least one in four robberies, muggings and pick pocketings were carried out by persons while on bail.
These figures confirm the public concern over crimes being committed by persons while on bail. Vincent Browne's superficial analysis of this issue does nothing to further the debate. Perhaps, when next he addresses the issue, he should spend more than 37 seconds in research. Yours, etc. Fianna Fail Spokesperson on Justice. Leinster House, Dublin 2.