Lucinda Creighton (Dublin South East, Fine Gael)

I express my deepest sympathy to the family of Shane Geoghegan. His murder is one of the most senseless and futile deaths in a long history of this State's failure to deal with organised crime. It is a failure of legislation, courts, policing and society. Most of all it is a failure of Government and particularly the Fianna Fáil-led Governments that have been in power for the best part of 12 years. On all these levels we need to attack and hold to account the criminals who are responsible for this behaviour.

The conviction rates for gangland criminality have been set out before by Deputy Charles Flanagan. However, I wish to highlight some of them. There have been 130 gangland murders in the past 11 years but only 14 convictions. Not a single person has been charged in the 16 gang-related murders that have taken place since 2003. That is a damning indictment of the Government and our so-called justice system. It illustrates in particular a failure of the system to deal with gangland criminals where gang bosses murder and maim with impunity. The Government has clearly failed to respond in any meaningful way. Over the course of the past week the Minister has said he is pretty much satisfied with the status quo. He was happy with his talks with the Garda Commissioner and does not plan any fundamental changes. This is simply not good enough. The Garda Commissioner does not run the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform and is not responsible for finding solutions to these problems. The Minister may try to pass the buck but the buck stops with him. He is the Minister who must find a solution to this appalling situation. He must respond to this crisis in the same way that Fine Gael did when we were in government during the rainbow coalition.

The new legislation announced today is simply inadequate and does not go far enough. Allowing gardaí to bug buildings, vehicles etc. is not a solution to the kind of endemic systematic drug-related gangland crime we are experiencing. We need creative solutions to tackle these unprecedented levels of criminality. I am not just talking about new legislation, which is not adequate without the political will driven by the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform to utilise that legislation. We have seen rafts of legislation in recent years which have simply been ineffectual. I point to the mandatory sentencing introduced for drug-related offences. Those mandatory sentences are just being ignored by the courts and are not being imposed. They essentially allow the entire justice system to be made a mockery of.

We need new criminal laws that will be implemented and which will have an effect in dealing with these gang leaders. I fundamentally believe that we now need preventive measures so that these criminals can be taken off the streets before they murder innocent young people with their entire lives laid out before them. This model should be based on the Offences against the State Act 1988, creating a new offence of organised gangland crime. We must see use of the Special Criminal Court and lengthy minimum sentences of between 20 and 25 years to really deal with these people, punish the offences and create a deterrent to being a leader of a gang in this State. We must prevent these types of criminals from committing the type of murder we have seen over the past number of years.

I am tired of hearing about the rights of criminals and that we must tip-toe around them. I am sick of the politically correct brigade, which seems to be running the show in this country. The Minister must stand up to it, as it is about balancing the rights of the individual against the rights, needs and interests of our society. The Minister and his predecessors have failed to do this.

It is vital our criminal justice system protects the innocent and that we are not held prisoner to the political correctness which seems to have gone mad in this country.

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