Jan O'Sullivan (Limerick East, Labour)

The first point I wish to make was made by our party spokesperson, Deputy Costello, and by others, namely, how an Opposition spokesperson is supposed to consider this Bill is beyond me. That any legislature would make a good job of addressing this legislation is also beyond me. On Committee Stage Members will have to deal with amending the following list of legislation: the Firearms Act 1925, the Explosives Act 1875, the Misuse of Drugs Act 1977, the Children Act 2001, section 19 of the Criminal Justice (Public Order) Act 1994, the Criminal Justice (United Nations Convention Against Torture) Act 2000 and the Courts (Supplemental Provisions) Act 1961 as well as the Criminal Justice Act with which they will be presented in the first instance.

I do not know how the Oireachtas will properly adjudicate on and end up with decent legislation after its deliberations. I do not believe it will be able to properly correlate what is in this legislation with the other legislation to which I referred. We could well end up with a legislative mess. We could discover that we have made serious mistakes with regard to criminal justice because of the way in which the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform aims to do business in this regard. I strongly make that point. It is crazy what the Oireachtas is being asked to do in dealing with this huge swathe of amendments on top of the original legislation and trying to relate it to the other relevant legislation. I would not like to be an Opposition spokesperson dealing with this legislation and I do not believe that anybody will be able to properly deal with it. It is our duty as legislators to properly deal with legislation and to properly amend it as necessary.

The Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform thinks he is better than everybody else and that the rest of us are not even knee high to him. I do not know how he can be Minister with responsibility for equality with that attitude. He obviously thinks that this is a sensible thing to do and that it can be done, but he is misleading the public. He constantly does that and bamboozles the public that by introducing all this legislation somehow or other he will address the problem of crime. He will not do so in that way, certainly not by this type of legislation nor by what he does in general. He keeps telling people that he is introducing legislation to address this, that and the other issue, while members of the public know that what they really need is Garda resources and the implementation of legislation that is already on the Statute Book. I do not object to some of the measures the Minister proposes to introduce in this Bill but if he does not allocate the necessary resources, he is wasting his time.

There are issues in regard to firearms, explosives, drug trafficking and so on, but if the Garda does not have the resources to implement that legislation it is going nowhere. If the Garda capacity in the communities that are beset by crime — I know about this as much as anybody else in the constituency from which I come — is not sufficient to deal with the criminals in its midst, we are going nowhere, and the Minister knows that. If the capacity of groups such as probation and welfare officers is insufficient, it will not be possible to deal with the young people when they initially become involved in crime and when something can be done for them. They will go on to become hardened criminals like their older brothers, whatever about their sisters.

There are much broader issues involved than simply the introduction of legislation dealing with crime. At night-time, for example, when people really need protection, the Garda does not have the resources to look after people in my own community. Deputy Lynch is correct. There are estates in my constituency where people feel bereft of support at night-time. It is no wonder that people are afraid to give evidence and that courts have difficulty in getting people to make statements against hardened criminals. Such witnesses have their windows, their cars threatened and, at times, their lives threatened because there is not adequate protection for them. It is all very well to state that people do not always carry through with making complaints, but one must give them and their communities the protection necessary to be able to stand up properly, in conjunction with the Garda, to the criminals in their midst.

The issue of community policing is one that my party has raised repeatedly and it has been a firm policy of ours for a long time that we need proper community policing. We also need proper local liaison committees that will liaise between communities and the police. Such committees still have not been put in place in any real way by the current Government. In the area where I live, we have set up regular consultation meetings between a representative group of residents in the different areas within the broader area and the Garda, and we meet two, three or four times a year. That is effective but we have had to do that ourselves. There is no structure through which local communities can directly involve themselves with the Garda unless they initiate it themselves.

The communities most beset by criminals are often the ones that do not possess the strength to set up such meetings because much of the time those who become the community leaders involved in setting up these effective liaison meetings are setting themselves up as targets. I agree with Deputy Lynch that the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform, Deputy McDowell, has no clue about what it is like to live in a community beset by criminals and about how much courage a person not properly protected must have in those communities to live any kind of normal life and be able to stand up to them.

There are a number of other issues. I want to refer, for example, to the misuse of drugs and strengthening the existing sentencing provisions for drug trafficking offences. Recently we had reason to raise an issue relating to two of our airports, Cork and Shannon, where there are no customs officials rostered at certain times at night when international flights arrive. I fail to understand how, on the one hand, the Government is not even putting customs officials in place while, on the other, the Minister is trying to strengthen the legislation against drug trafficking.

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