Michael McDowell (Dublin South East, Progressive Democrats)

I will try to answer it if the Deputy will stop shouting. The non-EEA national mother of a family with a conviction would be eligible for deportation and would fit into the figures I have supplied. However, it would be plainly wrong to deport or even consider deporting a person in those circumstances if her husband and children were law-abiding people legally resident in the State. Instead of trying to do a tired secondhand derivative piece of political grandstanding based on the Charles Clarke episode, which is based on different law in Britain, the Deputy would do better to study the table set out for him in the reply, come clean with the people and say there is a very significant rate of deportation of people who have served sentences in our prisons.

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