Tony Gregory (Dublin Central, Independent)

I support all measures that maximise co-operation on a European scale between law enforcement agencies. Its necessity has been brought home to us with the recent threats against Dublin Airport and, presumably, Shannon Airport. Such international co-operation is essential.

The Minister outlined the main types of organised crime that must be tackled through this legislation, such as money laundering, which is linked to drug dealing when we consider the tens of millions of euro being made in this country from that trade. Much of the money is being laundered outside the country. Some of our leading drug dealers are now based outside this country in Britain, Amsterdam and elsewhere.

I am glad the Minister is here and I can bring to his attention an issue I am sure he is very conscious of, the scale of the drugs problem, even over the past year. I remember raising this issue in the House in the early 1980s and I was repeatedly told in Dáil replies that the level of seizures was small, and the level of seizures determined the extent of the problem on the street. Therefore, the problem was under control because the amounts of heroin being taken were quite small. If that is translated into today's context — Deputy Catherine Murphy has drawn attention to it — we have had two seizures of heroin in the past two months, one worth €11 million and another prior to that in Ratoath with heroin worth €7 million. That is absolutely without precedent in the past 30 years in the State. Despite the significant drugs crisis which has enveloped many communities over that time, we have never seen amounts of heroin on such a scale. It almost constitutes a national emergency.

If, as we are repeatedly told, seizures represent between 12% and 14% of availability on the streets, such an amount representing 12% of availability at any one time on the streets means we are in big trouble. I know from my involvement in a community policing forum in the Store Street Garda district, where I attended a meeting a little over a week ago, that the gardaí in recent months are again seizing heroin right across the city. We all thought that was a thing of the past, that cocaine had eclipsed the drug to some degree and more cocaine was being seized, but heroin has made a recovery in a major way. I do not know if there are international reasons for this or if the situation in Afghanistan and so on is responsible for it, but what I know comes from the hard evidence of Garda seizures. There are massive amounts of the most deadly drug, heroin, available in this State.

I am unsure whether the Government has a strategy to respond to this problem or whether the Minister has considered what more must be done. I remember arguing in this House on many occasions prior to the murder of Veronica Guerin with a variety of Ministers for Justice, including former Deputy Nora Owen, that a need existed to bring different agencies together. These would include the investigation branch of the Department responsible for social welfare, the Revenue Commissioners, the Garda etc. Although everybody thought it was a great idea, nobody seemed able to bring it about.

The community organisation in my area, which I was involved in, actually went to those agencies and brought them together. Each one of those agencies felt it was a bad idea to set up a unified grouping to target drugs, assets etc. They felt they could, as individual agencies, do it and that they were doing it, but they clearly were not doing it. They resisted to the bitter end the idea of coming together until Veronica Guerin was murdered and the Government demanded new strategies. The Criminal Assets Bureau was one such strategy.

It is a great disappointment to me when I see people trafficking in heroin in some of the poorer areas of my constituency in the inner city all these years after the Criminal Assets Bureau was set up. These people are trafficking at a low to middle level. Girlfriends of these people are driving around in 2006 jeeps while claiming social welfare. I see individuals charged with possessing very large amounts of cocaine still wandering in and claiming social welfare, while they live in affluent apartments, for which they are probably claiming rent subsidies.

The whole idea of the Criminal Assets Bureau, as I understood it, and the argument for it was to prevent that happening, but it has had no impact whatever on such incidents in the areas where these drug dealers operate. I have raised the matter with the Minister in the past and I have raised it in the House on a number of occasions. There is a need to proactively review the operations of the Criminal Assets Bureau and to localise and regionalise it so that operatives from the Criminal Assets Bureau are in the areas where drugs are a major problem to prevent this type of scandal from happening. Everybody in the community can see these operations and are aware of the problem. Other young people may see such drug operations and if they think money is that easy to come by in dealing drugs, they might ask themselves why they should not get involved. It is attracting young people all the time for that reason. We can see the scale it is at now. The problem has spread throughout the suburbs and it is spreading throughout the country, yet there does not appear to be any strategic view of what is happening and how to tackle the problem.

We know how to tackle it, but responses have not been structured or put in place in the areas where they are needed. I again ask the Minister to consider this area and see what can be done. What is in place currently has not been effective, which is clear from the scale of the problem. We are aware of the large increase in the availability of drugs.

I referred to a number of recent seizures of significant amounts of drugs. In that context, it is a great credit to the Garda drug squads that they are able to make such seizures and get such an amount of drugs off the streets. I do not want to finish without mentioning that. However, those amounts reflect the problem. They tell us what we already know, that there is a massive problem out there. My difficulty is that, despite us knowing the problem is there and its ingredients, we are not tackling it in the way we indicated we would.

I pay tribute to Deputy Catherine Murphy, who has raised for the past year an equally blatant scandal in this area, where jets are flying into private aerodromes day in and day out without customs or Garda cover. The Deputy has seen it herself and she has graphically described people getting off these jets and straight into a taxi with their bags. I do not know if it was the Garda or the Belgian authorities, but between the two they stopped €10 million of heroin going on to an aeroplane in Belgium. That amount of drugs would have been carried down the steps from that privately-owned luxury jet and into a waiting cab or car in Weston Aerodrome. Yet we say we are serious about the drugs problem. I hope that issue is being dealt with.

Deputy Catherine Murphy raised an issue on which I put down a parliamentary question some time ago, the incredible position where the Garda authorities are not currently accessible through e-mail. People throughout my constituency contact me every day, and e-mail is the most frequently used contact I have in my office. Constituents living in the area contact me by e-mail and it is a nonsense that I cannot contact a Garda superintendent or chief superintendent by e-mail.

I hope the Minister will take on board some of the ideas referred to by both Deputy Catherine Murphy and I. We are referring to them in a positive way because we want them taken on board by the Minister and we want something done. We want to see the State agencies being effective against these people who are killing at will — as is evident every few weeks — because they believe they can get away with it and because of the huge sums of money they are earning from the drugs scene. It is one of the most destructive forces and activities in my constituency and in others throughout the State. I hope the issues we have raised will be carefully considered and perhaps acted upon.

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