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Another month, another new set of Covid-19 laws.
As of March 2020, when the Health Act 2020 was introduced, the Irish public has been subject to a number of sometimes perplexing criminal guidelines, restrictions and provisions.
The latest set of powers, which was decided by the Cabinet on Tuesday, will allow the Gardaí to issue fines for violating Level 5 restrictions that go into effect Thursday morning.
Those found making non-essential trips more than 5km from home or refusing to wear a mask in designated areas will likely face fines of up to € 500. Gardaí will also have the power to impose fines of € 1,000 on home party organizers.
Under previous versions of the restrictions, gardaí could prosecute event organizers and people taking non-essential travel in District Court, with convictions resulting in up to six months in prison and a fine of 2,500 euros.
However, officials considered these provisions to be too draconian and were rarely enforced anyway. We can expect the lower fines on the ground to be issued more generally.
But are fines an effective way to disrupt public behavior? That’s a debate that has been ongoing among behavioral scientists and health and public health experts since the beginning of the pandemic.
According to Dr. Pete Lunn, who heads the Behavioral Research Unit at the Institute for Economic and Social Research, people tend to overestimate the effectiveness of fines as a deterrent.
“Most of the people who break the rules are not doing a cost-benefit analysis that takes into account the probability of being caught and the size of the punishment.”
This is especially true with Covid-19 regulations, he said, because, for various reasons, only a small number of rule breakers will be caught.
“If you think about how many rules we are adopting and how much behavior is involved, monitoring is almost impossible.”
Nonetheless, “some degree of punishment” can play an important role as a “social signal,” says Lunn.
“It helps people who are making sacrifices to see that violators of the rules are stopped and punished.”
In this sense, the Gardaí have a tight rope to walk. Seeing some people punished for violating blatant rules will help public solidarity, but any overreaching could have the opposite effect.
Evidence of this has already been seen in the UK and France, where Covid-19 fine systems have been in place for months.
Early in the pandemic, French police came under fire for fining homeless people for not staying indoors. In the UK, hundreds of infringement prosecutions had to be dismissed due to improper application of the law.
In some Asian countries, large fines and other draconian punishments have formed a central part of state responses to Covid-19 and many have recognized that they play an important role in the region’s successful response to the virus.
In Singapore, for example, officials use mobile apps to monitor the movements of quarantined citizens, with fines of $ 10,000 for those outside their homes. In some parts of Indonesia, rule breakers may be forced to dig the graves of Covid-19 victims.
These measures are unlikely to work in a liberal democracy like Ireland. Instead, “voluntary behavior will be overwhelmingly the most important factor,” says Lunn. “The fines will only be one piece of the puzzle.”
The gardaí that will be responsible for imposing these fines has so far expressed conflicting views on their introduction.
Like other Covid-19 measures, fines will only be issued when other options have been exhausted. Gardaí will be encouraged to use the “Four Is” approach: involve, explain, encourage and, as a last resort, enforce.
This means that a great deal of discretion will be involved in issuing fines. A Garda district can receive a large number of fines, compared to another where members prefer a soft approach.
“Management is obsessed with numbers. If they see that a district distributes lots of fines and we only distribute a few, they will fall on one of us ”, commented one member.
Some members have also questioned how gardaí fine house party organizers if they are not allowed into the houses. The Garda Association of Sergeants and Inspectors suggested that people could avoid being fined simply by refusing to open the door to the gardaí.
Others welcomed the fact that the fines mean they can revert to what one garda called “royal surveillance.” In recent months, the gardaí were expected to guard checkpoints and inspect facilities without any enforcement powers to back them up, generating frustration among some members.
“They call them to a massive party and all they can say is, ‘Guys, wouldn’t you consider going home? And they can stand there and tell him to mind his own business, ”said another garda. “At least now there is a threat looming over them.”
But what good is a fine if no one is going to pay it? We already know that the Irish court system has trouble enforcing fines.
Those who refuse to pay fines on the spot will likely end up facing our already overburdened and backward court system, which has a poor record of recovering unpaid fines.
The introduction of the Fines (Payment and Recovery) Act of 2014 means that it is very difficult to send someone to prison for failing to pay a fine.
This had the positive effect of reducing the number of inmates, but non-payment of fines tripled.
We know from elsewhere that Covid-19 fines are unlikely to be very different. According to UK data released last month, only half of the fines issued by the police for breaches of Covid-19 rules have been paid since March.
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