Jim O'Keeffe (Cork South West, Fine Gael)

Standing in Thomond Park in sympathy with the family, fiancé and friends of Shane Geoghegan, I could sense the heartfelt wish of people to recover our country from the thugs and gangs. The Fianna Fáil Party has not been successful in dealing with gangland crime in the past ten years. Shane Geoghegan was the 17th victim of gangs this year alone and of the 127 people killed in the past ten years, only 14 convictions have been secured, hardly a record of success by any manner or means.

I do not suggest that simple solutions are available. However, the first requirement of the Fianna Fáil Party in Government is to come out of denial mode and accept that there is a serious problem. The Government relies heavily on statistics which tend to fluctuate in the areas of headline and indictable crime. It is clear that there has been a large and inexorable increase in violent crime, specifically killings, the use of firearms and knives and drug related crime. The Government should take its collective head out of the sand.

From time to time, some members of the media, which are noticeably absent for this debate, treat the issue of crime very lightly. I suppose the media will pronounce on the issue before we know where we are. It is necessary to be factual and truthful towards people and the Government has failed in this regard. We used to have a pretence from the former Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform about the number of gardaí which involved counting fellows who had been inside the door of Templemore for one day as fully attested gardaí. Even now, while the Government amendment refers to 1,100 Garda trainees, it does not mention that the figure will fall to 400 next year. It is important to tell people these facts.

We have the pretence from the Minister that the motion was tabled by the Fine Gael Party to criticise the Garda. With all due respect to the Minister, this is a silly defence which should be beyond him. The motion is aimed at criticising the Government and urging support for the Garda Síochána and the reform and updating of the criminal justice system. We demand answers to very legitimate questions. There is a promise to introduce legislation on a DNA database next year. The Minister does not mention that this was promised in 2006 and was due to be law in 2007. We had promises in relation to the criminal procedure Bill, dealing with the possibility of the retrial of an acquitted person in the event of perjury and so on. How will the other issues raised by the criminal law review group be dealt with, matters such as the exclusionary rule and so on? What we are getting from the Government is a knee-jerk reaction when what is needed is a sustained committed approach, resources for the Garda Síochána and continual updating of the criminal justice system. We had many debates in the last Dáil in relation to electronic tagging, for instance, and how useful that would be from the viewpoint of dealing with criminals and suspects. Eventually, as a result of Fine Gael urging, that was put into legislation in 2006 and 2007. However, the present Minister clearly has no intention of implementing that important measure. It has been a feature of the criminal justice systems in Canada since 1984 and is common in many EU countries as well as in New Zealand, Australia and the United States and yet we do not have it. On the other hand, we have a system in which, clearly, there is failure by the authorities to keep track of suspects released. As a consequence, the number of offences committed by suspects released on bail has risen by 60% in the last four years, from 15,000 to more than 25,000. If we had implemented what is now law, we should have a system that allows the authorities to keep track of serious offenders when they are released from prison, such as sex offenders or violent criminals who are likely to re-offend, and also a system that would allow people released on bail to be electronically monitored.

This is a Government that is not dealing with crime in the sustained manner that is needed. It is not using the further legislative measures that are required and from that point of view it must stand condemned. We demand a consistent sustained approach, which will be supported by Fine Gael while this Government lasts in office, to attack the enormous amount of crime that exists, give resources to the Garda and reform and implement the criminal justice system.

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