Pat Rabbitte (Dublin South West, Labour)

If that is what happened it is a very positive step. I am delighted to see the Minister is more responsive than the two people who held the office prior to him. If we are dealing in logic does he not accept in turn that it is hardly a big deal to involve them now that the decision has been made? I am sure they found the presentation very informative but all we are doing today is reaffirming in a one-paragraph Bill the motion that has already been passed by both Houses of the Oireachtas. Depending on where one is coming from, I find that a bit late in the day, if not cynical in the extreme. If it was an initiative of the new Minister then I accept it at face value.

I am less critical than my colleague, Deputy Charlie Flanagan. I should say I would express it differently from him when he said we asked several questions of the Minister but we did not get any answers. That is not quite true. In his speech the Minister sought to deal with some of the issues we raised, for example, Dóchas, the issue of 16 year olds and 17 year olds and asylum seekers among others. Where I agree with Deputy Charlie Flanagan is that the answers are not very meaningful. I should give the Minister credit for the fact that he is new to the job. As the matter has progressed I have been struck by how little the Minister bothered to inform himself about it. It is only as we have gone along that we have extracted answers from him to central issues that we have raised but in fairness to the Minister, he has attempted to answer some of the questions in his speech. I presume the reference in his script to the fact that at present 16 and 17 male prisoners are held in St. Patrick's should read that 16 year old and 17 year old prisoners are held in St. Patrick's. The Minister's answers are not very convincing. We never recommended that Dóchas should be retained at Mountjoy and that there should be a new Dóchas centre in Thornton Hall. Nobody ever argued that point, which is the one addressed in the script. It seems to us that the reason Dóchas is being knocked down is two-fold; one, that the Department bought so much land at Kilsallaghan that the Minister needs to put something on it, and second, that the development potential of the site at Mountjoy would be impacted on if Dóchas was not knocked down.

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