Tony Gregory (Dublin Central, Independent)

The Minister will be aware that I raised this issue with him in the past here in the Dáil and my question was to him, not to the Garda Commissioner, with all due respect to the Commissioner. Will the Minister accept that when people like myself were in this House calling for the establishment of an agency such as the Criminal Assets Bureau, it was the Garda authorities, the Revenue Commissioners' investigation branch and the investigation branch of the then Department of Social Welfare who stated that it was not a good idea and that they wanted to stay in their own territories, keep structures as they were and tackle it? The death of Veronica Guerin was the lever the Government used to establish the bureau despite the resistance of the very people who are now resisting the practical measure I suggest.

I again ask the Minister, if targeting the assets of drug crime is the way forward, does he agree it would be a good idea to target those assets at local level. With the Leas-Ceann Comhairle's permission, I will give a brief example of what I mean. This is one of many. A young couple was raided in a private apartment where drugs were found and they were charged. One of them will take the rap. Currently, the partner, who is on social welfare, who has a rent allowance and who drives a blacked-out jeep, has just returned from a skiing holiday, and has had expensive cosmetic surgery — there are a range of other matters I do not have time to mention here. At the lower to middle level in the drugs trade nothing is being done about any of those matters, for instance, claiming social welfare while being clearly caught in possession of a large amount of drugs and having assets available to them which they clearly could not have on a social welfare income. That is the scenario that fuels the drug crime gangs whose members are killing one another every couple of weeks in this city. That is the way the gangs build up.

The Criminal Assets Bureau, according to the debates in this House and elsewhere, was set up to target people like that, whether through their social welfare payments, their jeeps, their expensive holidays, etc. The bureau is not doing that at local level. I am not interested in whether the bureau is centralised or localised. I am interested in operatives targeting assets of people involved in drugs at local level. It is not happening.

I presume the €58 million the Minister mentioned in his response, which figure pales into insignificance in the context of the €1 billion industry of which we speak, is for the proceeds of all crime, not just drug crime, since the CAB was set up. Why, if the bureau is so good at dealing with organised drug crime, has it expanded throughout the country since its establishment? The Minister cannot have it both ways. It is as plain as day that since 1996 drug crime and drug gangs have expanded and flourished throughout Dublin's inner city, from the inner city to the suburbs, and to other cities around the country, and have led to the current scenario where it is so lucrative that human life itself is valueless and people are shot dead for the most trivial of reasons.

In the context of all of that, and particularly in the context of my first point on which I will conclude, when we all — including Veronica Guerin who was murdered for it — were calling for an agency to target the assets of the drug gangs, all the people who the Minister now quotes as a reason for him not to take this further step were the same ones who resisted that measure at the time. As the buck stops with the Minister, I ask him to give a little more consideration to the points I made. I would suggest some practical measure like the one I put forward would be far more productive than infringements on the right to silence and the endless other legislative innovations and initiatives the Minister is taking. Something practical on the ground, such as going after the assets of these people, is also essential if we are to get to grips with the problem.

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