Jim O'Keeffe (Cork South West, Fine Gael)

The House has had a very good debate on the Fine Gael Party motion calling on the Government to abandon the plans of the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform to licence café bars. It is clear the proposal is dead and buried.

Fine Gael follows the views of health professionals on the connection between further alcohol outlets and more alcohol abuse. The Minister, on the other hand, followed Fianna Fáil backbench Deputies and ended up with his theoretical social engineering project shot down in flames as Fine Gael had demanded.

My party opposes the Government amendment which deletes two other important proposals, namely, the need for a co-ordinated approach at Government level to the preparation and implementation of a national alcohol strategy and the need to provide the Garda with the necessary resources to enforce licensing legislation and tackle public disorder.

While the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform has had his wings well and truly clipped, I have not noticed any sorrowful tears in evidence as a consequence. He has not been gracious in defeat, having refused to accept the genuinely held views of many, not only on this side of the House, that more drink outlets leads to more alcohol consumption and that his suggestion that café bars would lead to the end of binge drinking was pie in the sky. Many outside the House, including experts in the field, shared this view.

Even worse, to save face the Minister tried to con the public that he was never fully behind the café bar idea and, subsequently, that he was replacing his proposal by what he described as a radical reform of the licensing regime for restaurants. This, he stated, had been his preferred way to proceed in the first place. Then we had the dénouement when we found out this was another cock and bull story when he was exposed as having merely put forward a minor proposal from, of all organisations, the Vintners Association of Ireland. To crown the matter, the Minister came into the House and excoriated those alleged by him to be in the pockets of vested interests, namely, the same vintners. He did not even notice the irony of his presentation.

The Minister should stop insulting the intelligence of the public. He tried this when he announced his phantom 2,000 extra gardaí and presented a brand new traffic corps which, on investigation, was shown to include the same number of members of the Garda today as it had when it was being rebranded. He now expects the public to believe that replacing the redundant café bar proposal with a minor proposal from the licensed vintners amounts to radical reform. It is not radical, it is ridiculous. The Minister and his Progressive Democrats are becoming progressively redundant.

Now that issue is out of the way, we should look to the future. Apart from the points well made by my colleagues about this Government having to face an election soon, serious issues remain to be addressed, such as the need for a co-ordinated alcohol strategy. One of the greatest failures of this Government is that although such a policy was produced by the rainbow Government almost ten years ago, nothing similar has been put in place. This country has suffered since, with enormous increases in consumption and associated problems. We will pay dearly for the failure to implement that strategy. The promises made on enforcement, extra gardaí and resources for them have not been fulfilled and, as a consequence, there is additional alcohol abuse.

This motion is reasonable and the very least the Government can do at this stage is to accept it in full.

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