Mr. Colin Fee:

I have three sites in Dundalk. One of them is much more troublesome than the others. We find it very hard to fill the roster in that site. We have had people who have handed in their notice and we moved them to another site and they have stayed with us. It is because of constantly being threatened and being abused every day. I said earlier that we report absolutely everything. We have staff who are being threatened and are being told that they will be got at on their way home. Then we end up having to drive them home ourselves because the threat is always there.

There is one particular guy who started at 14 or 15. He did us 100 times and that was just our shop. There was nothing that could be done because he was under 16. The older he got the more aggressive and vicious he became. He ended up pulling a knife on one of our staff on two occasions. He committed a crime somewhere else and he is now in Oberstown. However, why did it take so long? We were able to tell the Garda that this guy was going to kill somebody one of these days. Why did it take so long? With somebody under 16 the Garda's hands are tied.

Everybody's hands are tied and nothing can be done about them. As Mr. Jennings said in his opening statement, it starts off at the level described and gets progressively worse. The guy I have mentioned will end up-----