Ruairi Quinn (Dublin South East, Labour)

The current borrowing rate the State can get is on a par with the European lending level. The rip-off of the public private partnership procurement system is not in the quality of the project management. It is not in the planning process or the value-for-money elements of the contract. It is in the rip-off for no risk because there is no market for prisons. There is no private sector competition yet of which I am aware. The Government is forcing the double payment on interest rate terms for the public private partnership, yet the Progressive Democrats lecture the Labour Party about market economics. The Government has a surplus in terms of revenue, a surplus in underspent capital budget, and the Government is offering a present to the suits down in the IFSC who do nothing other than enhance by a factor of 100% the return on lending. Shylock would not have got a better deal than some of these public private partnership deals that we are getting on the interest rate alone.

I fully support the project management benefits that come from it and the management of it in regard to a number of operational details. However, the idea of paying a so-called premium risk rate for something in respect of which there is no risk whatsoever is the height of economic incompetence and I hope the electorate punishes the Government for it.

The Minister introduced certain comments and provoked me accordingly. I will now return to the topic of what we are trying to do. I welcome this motion which the Labour Party supports. I welcome the courtesy with which my colleague, Deputy Howlin, has been treated by the officials in the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform in terms of the briefing we received on this tragedy. We must learn lessons from it and I hope we get a constructive report that will enable us to proceed in the future.

The kind of prison facility that is contemplated for Thornton Hall and in Kilworth in County Cork is not the solution for the category of person for whom this society currently has no place of refuge. I have in mind another constituent who was beaten up in the inner city by a gang of thugs when he was in his mid-20s. He is brain damaged and veers into criminality. He wanders openly into shops in and around New Street and engages in petty street theft. The only civic response this society has to this person is to arrest him. He has been arrested on numerous occasions and brought back to the family home. His mother, who is now in her 80s, cannot cope with him any more. There is no place in our society for that person other than jail, where he will be brutalised. Whatever about incarcerating criminals who are professional in their assault on our society, we must, in the richness this country possesses and never possessed before, find a way of providing for people such as my constituent sheltered, secure and, possibly, mandatory accommodation, in the sense that they are not allowed to leave except in certain circumstances. That should be separate from the situation where we are incarcerating real criminals.

I suspect that the individuals involved in the incident in respect of which this commission of inquiry is being established — I am being careful in my selection of words — fall as much into the second category of damaged individuals as into the first category of real criminals. Unless we learn that lesson from this specific incident, we will not be any wiser. I suggest that the Minister and his colleagues might examine the way in which the Nordic countries deal with these problems. We do not have a monopoly or an excessive percentage of such persons in our society. There must be another way of dealing with them. While this inquiry will throw some light on what happened, I hope the senior counsel appointed will make some recommendations about where persons such as the person involved in this incident and perhaps others might be incarcerated other than in a prison for criminals.

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