Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael)

I wish to share time with Deputy Deasy. I welcome the Government provision of time to discuss and make statements on this issue. The allocation reflects the seriousness with which Government and Opposition parties take crime. Many Deputies have spoken about gangland crime, murder, the drugs industry and people trafficking, the last of which we will discuss further at another time. I wish to use my time to make a case to the Minister for the community court concept, about which many generalisations have been made today which were not necessarily helpful. I wish to provide the Minister with details of a precise and well-thought-out concept for which the case has been made in the report National Crime Council report published in August 2007.

Community courts would represent an improvement and expansion of the drugs court concept. They would address the sorts of minor crimes which do not currently go before courts and which gardaí say it is not worth the hassle to try as they will be thrown out. As a result, people do not even report such crimes. I think of broken windows, for example. If a window is broken in an empty building and not repaired reasonably quickly, a great many other windows will be broken in a short space of time. If small crimes do not have consequences, they will lead to a great many more small crimes and, subsequently, a far more serious criminal problem. The advantage of a community court system is that it can be established specifically to deal with minor crimes of drug use, assault and the forms of anti-social behaviour we are seeing at the heart of every town and city on Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights.

I assume the officials with the Minister have read the crime council's report, as perhaps has the Minister. What is envisaged is that accused persons would agree to attend a community court as an alternative to the existing courts system and plead guilty. If a guilty plea were not entered, the matter would revert to the ordinary courts. Therefore, the community court system would involve the acceptance of a guilty plea by the court and fault by the accused individual. The community court would then be responsible for putting a package of responses in place including punishment, which is necessary, but also counselling, drug addiction programmes and a series of other supports designed to reduce the likelihood of the small-time criminal becoming involved in further criminal or anti-social activity or a life of crime. That makes sense to me because the existing system for small-time criminals falls at every corner. In the first instance, most small-time criminals never go to court because it is too much trouble for gardaí to follow through on minor crimes. If somebody is punched in the face after leaving a nightclub, he or she is unlikely to receive satisfaction in the normal courts system even if the crime is reported to the Garda. However, he or she could get satisfaction in a properly implemented community court system.

The National Crime Council's proposals may not be perfect but given that the average prisoner in Ireland is in prison for the seventh time, we should consider the concept. When a person leaves prison, he or she is more than likely to return within a few years, so the system is failing in terms of reducing the likelihood of criminal activity among small-time offenders. We need to break that cycle and the way to do so is by taking a different approach.

See this speech in context