Charles Flanagan (Laois-Offaly, Fine Gael)

Hiding behind the separation of powers does not allow for justice to be delivered to murder victims or their families. The Houses of the Oireachtas enacted legislation in respect of mandatory sentencing and if that legislation is being flouted, the Minister must take action.

For those criminals who are incarcerated, prison is not always an obstacle to criminality. Time and again it has been shown that criminals are able to continue to run their gangland empires from inside our prisons. Almost 1,500 mobile phones were confiscated in prisons during the first eight months of this year. Vague promises have been made about introducing signal blocking technology to all prisons but what is happening in the meantime? I would like the Minister to inform the House how these phones get into prisons in the first place. It is simply not good enough. I ask him to spell out the reason why he has not introduced a ban on mobile phones in Portlaoise prison while we await this technology. Certain categories of people can bring in their mobile phones with impunity. They are not even checked coming out to verify whether they still have the phone or the SIM card. Chances are that if they have the phone the SIM card is inside but they might not even have the phone.

Rehabilitation within prisons is non-existent. Many people leave prison having become more adept at criminality rather than having turned away from it. What minor rehabilitation and education programmes existed in prisons have become victims of the latest budget. Some people might scoff at the idea of rehabilitation, but in the context of habitual criminality with recidivism rates hitting almost 50% for ex-offenders four years after their release and at a cost of almost €100,000 per prisoner per annum to incarcerate an offender, rehabilitation is something that we need to take very seriously indeed. Our prisons are full to capacity. As we speak we have more prisoners behind bars than ever before yet the recidivism rate indicates that prisons are failing. Thornton Hall, the Government's great white hope and the justification why so little has been done with existing prisons, is in a state of limbo. The scandal of our prisons is another slur on the Minister's poor record.

This week the Garda Commissioner highlighted an absence of legislation relating to surveillance of criminals as a major stumbling block. Gardaí use covert surveillance when tackling gangland crime but the material they gather remains inadmissible in criminal trials. While I welcome what the Minister has said this evening, we know why he said it. If it had not been for the events of the past ten days he would not have been in Buswell's Hotel.

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