Assembly's own scrutiny is now raising the very questions the Countryside Alliance Ireland has been asking for months and dog walkers, gamekeepers and landowners all have a stake in the answer.
The Hunting with Dogs Bill is no longer just a headline fight over fox hunting. As the Assembly's Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs Committee works through its evidence sessions, one thing has become clear: the concerns Countryside Alliance Ireland has been raising since the Bill was introduced are not fringe objections. They are being echoed, question for question, in the Assembly's own independent research.
That matters. RaISe, the Assembly's research and information service, has gone out of its way to say it takes no view on whether hunting itself is right or wrong. Its job is simply to test how the Bill would actually work, and test it did, producing a list of unresolved questions they've put in front of the committee that reads remarkably like a Countryside Alliance briefing note. Are the Bill's definitions clear enough? Are the exemptions workable? Should there be a licensing scheme? Are the penalties proportionate? Has the rural and economic impact been properly assessed? These are not the Alliance's talking points dressed up, they are the Assembly's own scrutiny doing exactly what scrutiny is supposed to do. Highlighting the very same fundamental flaws that CAI have done since the Bill introduction.
Nowhere is that overlap sharper than on the question of dog walkers. It was the committee chair, not the Countryside Alliance, who put it plainly to RaISe: what happens when a dog slips its lead and does what dogs do? To which RaISe's answer should worry anyone who exercises a dog in the countryside. The Bill's offence of "participation" extends beyond actively and intentionally engaging in hunting, to a dog merely pursuing a scent of a wild mammal. RaISe has openly asked why only one such scenario is spelled out in the legislation, when the same logic this scenario could apply far more widely, encompassing even the most innocent dog walker with such catch-all style wording. One committee member put it even more bluntly: if an alien landed in a field and saw someone walking a dog, that is exactly what they'd see, a person walking a dog. Whether the law would agree depends on definitions that separate dog walking and hunting with a dog, which RaISe itself says are only partially written down. For professional dog walkers, or anyone exercising working breeds with a natural instinct to hunt, that is not a technicality. It's the difference between a walk in the park and a criminal record carrying up to five years in prison.
And the penalties are not a footnote. This Bill would impose fines of up to £20,000 and 12 months in prison on summary conviction, rising to an unlimited fine and five years on indictment, penalties considerably higher than those that currently apply to hare coursing in Northern Ireland. RaISe has been direct about what that means: where criminal liability is this serious, legal certainty stops being a nicety and becomes essential. Yet, unlike similar legislation elsewhere in the UK, this Bill contains no statutory defence for someone who genuinely and reasonably believed they were acting within an exemption.
The exemptions themselves come loaded with conditions: a two-dog limit, a requirement that dogs remain under control, landowner permission, steps to stop packs forming, several of which RaISe says are not sufficiently defined. The two-dog limit in particular has been flagged as a live concern for pest and predator control, with the Assembly's own committee visit to Glenwherry cited as evidence of how narrowly that could bite into legitimate wildlife and conservation management. Unlike Scotland, this Bill includes no licensing system that might let genuine conservation or pest-control work continue beyond that limit, a gap RaISe has asked the committee to consider filling.
Then there's the money. The Bill's own financial memorandum claimed it would carry no direct cost, but RaISe found that neither DAERA, the Department of Justice nor the PSNI have yet been able to say what enforcement will actually cost, at a time when Stormont is already operating under an emergency 95% budget cap. Fine income, meanwhile, won't even go back into enforcement: it goes straight into the general consolidated fund.
Add to that the legal advice secured after Countryside Alliance correspondence, advice confirming the Assembly Speaker will formally reconsider the Bill's legislative competence before its final stage, and a clear picture emerges. This is not a Bill that has been rubber-stamped by scrutiny. It is a Bill whose own scrutiny process keeps turning up unanswered questions.
For Countryside Alliance Ireland, the message to members is straightforward: keep watching this closely. The principle of a ban may dominate the headlines, but it's the unresolved detail, on dog walkers, on definitions, on penalties, on cost that will decide what rural life in Northern Ireland actually looks like if this Bill becomes law.