Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour)

As a politician, the Minister is a great debater but winning the debate rather than implementing policy seems to be his main aim. The people will make the judgment on that.

With regard to sentencing, we now have a completely different section 24. The apparent mandatory provision is nothing of the kind, since a saver clause is being introduced for judges to exercise discretion, something that should have been there from the beginning and that I am happy to see now. We have reduced the number of offences considerably, to what the Minister has now determined to be gangland offences. However, the notion of parsing and analysing crime is peculiar, since another crime will capture the headlines tomorrow against which we may wish specific measures.

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