Michael McDowell (Dublin South East, Progressive Democrats)

As I said yesterday I appreciate the Deputies' point. There is jurisprudence, particularly in Canada, to the effect that it is possible to have proportionate mandatory sentences which, having regard to the value of the drugs, would be absolute and fixed. The downside of this as Deputy Howlin says, in a point with which I sympathise, is that it might be interpreted as saying this is a two-tier offence and that between €13,000 and €500,000 there is a no-man's-land where the law exists but does not mean what it says. If that were the outcome that would be the opposite of what most people in the House would like the law to be, a direction to the Judiciary that the minimum mandatory sentence for significant quantities of drug trafficking is ten years——

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