Michael D Higgins (Galway West, Labour)

It is interesting that we are spending this time, late on a Wednesday afternoon, making arrangements to fine people who beg in a adverse fashion, or if they do not pay their fine they will be imprisoned. This is happening at a time when our economy and financial system have been brought into what is regarded as daily peril by a group of well-heeled people who probably never walked past a beggar.

I note that previous speakers paid tribute to our social services and to the Minister. However, there was no reference to the calls that students received from banks, in the midst of our greatest excess, to tell them that they were under-borrowed. There was no reference either to those poor families now in negative equity who, when they went to borrow the price of a house, were asked "Are you sure you don't want to take an extra €15,000 or €20,000 for a car?" People are still illegally ringing up to undertake cold selling on the telephone, asking people to get into debt. All of that is regarded as respectable.

It is also acceptable and respectable to lurk abroad while people are looking for one and looking for one's accounts to establish if one had been putting false information on the balance sheet of one's company and arranging with another person to accommodate one by shifting money between the month of November and the month of January. All of that will no doubt be discussed in time and with great respectability. I am not in favour of people being intimidated for contributions in the street or anywhere else but it is quite extraordinary that due to the absence of any response by way of urgency to those who have been guilty of fraud, those who have absconded while the allegation of fraud hangs around them or those who have put pressure on people to enter into debt in an intimidatory way are walking free.

I know a bit about the Vagrancy (Ireland) Act 1847. Its origin is not in 1847; vagrancy legislation goes back to the 17th century and earlier. It is closely associated with the enclosure movement in Britain, for example, which drove hundreds of thousands of people from their smallholdings towards London. That is the origin of the term "vagrant". I do not have time to develop the point but the rounding up of vagrants was a major source of manpower for the colonies in the Caribbean for the sugar industry, for example. People were picked up from the prisons, as were those who were ill or vagrant and they were shipped off to the Caribbean often without knowing where they were going. That is the origin of vagrancy.

The idea of vagrancy is that one is not insulated by having property. Thus in this Bill, for example, one will be at risk if one is not able to say where one lives - if one does not have an address. At present, a number of State institutions refuse to deal with a person who has an address at a hostel for immigrants or refugees. Likewise, some State agencies do not regard Simon hostels as an acceptable address. Many people who are on the street are homeless. I have listened to two contributions that suggested what wonderful social services we have. If that is the case, why then in July 2008 did the Health Service Executive retreat from providing two houses that were looking after young people aged between 12 and 18? The Labour Party will seek to change the Bill on Committee Stage, but the legislation applies to children. The congratulatory group who rise late in the afternoon and talk about what a wonderful country it is, how we have done so much and who say we are looking after everyone so well, these are the people associated with the missing bankers and the disgraceful record of fraud. These are the people whom they supported and who then suggest that it is wonderful that we are cleaning up all of this now. Are they not heroic?

I do not want anyone to intimidate anyone, not only within 10 m of an ATM machine or adjacent to a place of business, but I would like to think we have a sense of proportion in terms of what we regard as urgent. I worked as a sociologist for more than 30 years. I am curiously in the area of the sociology of criminal law and deviant behaviour. In those days we used to look for evidence. I have looked at the report of the Law Reform Commission and other reports. Where is the empirical evidence that this is a serious criminal issue or even that it is in the top rank of the ten most serious issues? We are told it was urgent to deal with the matter because the Vagrancy (Ireland) Act 1847 was struck down so we must do something. I am sure the legislation will be regarded as a real achievement.

The previous two speakers stressed the social services we have and what a wonderful country it is. Contributions get more pompous as one gets closer to the evening. There is no 24-hour nationwide social work service for children. I referred to the two residential centres for children between 12 years and 18 years. The Health Service Executive announced a funding freeze on services dealing with homelessness in July 2008. What can one say to those people? The deconstruction of the language of the Bill is that if one is begging and homeless, or if no services are available, then one should just remember to be polite. The important thing is not to upset anyone. That is where the law is at its worst.

There is a history of child abuse in this country. The practice was to press a coin into the hands of children who were not being looked after by their parents so that they could be accused of begging and then they could be rammed into an institution. They were in then out of the rain and the cold but they needed the coin pressed into their hands to get them inside the door.

I have listened to debate in this area for a long time. I was on the MacBride commission on prisons. After that came the Whittaker commission and several other commissions on prisons. How can one justify such a process in 2010? If a person who may be suffering from drug abuse, is intoxicated or is in the withdrawal stages of intoxication, strays within the forbidden 10 m zone, he or she is already in line for a likely fine of €200 unless he or she gives a name and address when requested to do so. Next, the person is brought to the Garda station and he or she is told there may be a €400 fine. This is a person begging in the circumstances I have described. Then the person faces a month in prison. In spite of debating other legislation in which it was agreed by all sides of the House that one should not have people in prison for whom it is not the best option, it is being suggested that it is socially progressive in 2010 to introduce the Bill before the House. Now we are creating the opportunity to send people to prison in this way.

My colleague, Deputy Pat Rabbitte, suggested that the Labour Party will not oppose the legislation on Second Stage but that we will have amendments to offer on Committee Stage. Indeed we will. I would go a bit further. I find the assumptions made in the speeches to which I listened quite extraordinary. Deputy Grealish, who was on holidays in the United States, ran into an FBI man and he had dinner with him in the evening. They discovered that there was a millionaire with one leg who was earning $500,000 a year. All I can say is that is wonderful. At least he did not ask him to contribute to the Progressive Democrats because it was bereft. Perhaps he should have gone on his holidays earlier. That is the kind of facetious comment that is made in the context of the Bill.

The notion as well is that people begging are a blot on the landscape and get in the way of tourism. The next stage is that when one has all of those attitudes oneself, one can then say there are wonderful organisations that do great things. Simon provides soup. The Society of St. Vincent de Paul offers good quality second-hand clothes and does great work. When I was working as a sociologist, I found it interesting how few people ever stopped to talk to the people involved. That is a clue to what I have to say next. How can one conclude what is the intention of the person who is accused of begging, such as the one-legged man in America to whom Deputy Grealish referred in his extraordinary speech, who is driving an enormously expensive car with his one leg, apart from the €500,000 house he owns? When one reads the speech one will know why the Progressive Democrats came and went. That is all I have to say on the matter.

I hope people will look carefully at Deputy Grealish's speech and what he has to say. Following the jurisprudence section of his speech, in which he referred to the Dillon case, Deputy Grealish argued that "a key aspect of the new legislation is clarity" and suggested that gardaí may have problems in ascertaining whether a person is 10 m or 11 m from an ATM. What if a person staggered within the forbidden area? Is it not marvellous?

I believe that intimidation is wrong, particularly in the circumstances to which people have referred. People should be free to use the public space. All of us in the public space should show a certain degree of compassion. If a child is begging, that is an indictment of the society in which we live. In such a case, there should be a referral service to which the child can be sent. If there is no 24-hour referral service, that is an indictment of the state of the Government. If one believes somebody is being manipulated or forced to beg - it has been suggested that some groups engage in such activity - one should identify the source of that pressure and address it. One does not need to drag an address out of the person in question, or to send them to jail, in order to address the matter.

I wish to refer to another issue that arises in the Bill, purely as a piece of law. I recently attended a meeting of the community policing initiative committee in Galway. I find that a couple of councillors make it a specialty. One of Deputy Grealish's colleagues does not like to talk about legislation, or anything like that, but prefers to talk about those who are present and those who are not. During the course of the meeting, I asked a question about an interesting aspect of the issue of begging. The decent superintendent who was in attendance said that it was in a bit of a limbo at the present time. Deputy Grealish spoke about clarity earlier in this debate. If a garda suggests to a person that he or she should move on, then asks the person for his or her address, and on it goes, how is that clear? None of this is clear. None of it is reasonably operable for a garda who is trying to do his or her best. Issues of discretion are being left entirely unbalanced. How can one reasonably defend oneself from an accusation of begging in a way that contravenes this law? I cannot see it. I suggest that the Bill is drafted in a manner that takes refuge in the fact that such a person is unlikely seek to vindicate before the courts his or her right to beg properly. Deputy Grealish made the interesting suggestion that these restrictions should apply to "the surrounds of churches". Perhaps the suggestion can be linked to the departure of the Progressive Democrats, in so far as it would ensure we are relieved from Progressive Democrat collections, at least, if such collections continue after the winding-up of that party.

There is another interesting point to be made about the country in which we are living. I do not want to comment on the other pillars of our State. I remember when the President said we no longer needed to be second to anybody. She suggested that we were up there with the best of them. Were we not wonderful? There are hungry people begging and sleeping rough on our streets because there is no place for them to go. There was a time when we used to go around the world asking other countries if they would like to know how we did it. Those who used to ask people to come here and find out how we did it are the kind of people who would not be happy with one house, or 12 houses. They would have to have 14 houses in Ireland and a few more abroad and to be travelling regularly. We had more than a fake tan society; we had a fake moral society. Our first response to the demise of that society - at a time when many bankers are on the run and many people are slowly trying to search for documents in banks - is to go after the people who are embarrassingly begging. It tells us a great deal.

This Bill raises a serious issue with regard to children, in the context of Article 11 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. One cannot haul a child into a station, but that is what this legislation would do. My views about youngsters who are in trouble might be very unfashionable at the moment. When I was a student at Manchester University, Barbara Castle published a magnificent document, Children in Trouble, for the British Labour Party. A great deal of children are in trouble or are offending many people, for example, by drinking in bushes or in the open, but there is nowhere else for them to go. These youngsters may have all sorts of personal difficulties. If they could walk into some kind of centre to talk to someone, their needs might be identified at an early stage. If squad cars brought children home, if they have homes, or to some place where they feel safe, it would be better than introducing them to the criminal process, as this legislation proposes.

According to section 2(b) of the Bill before the House, a person who, while begging in any place, "obstructs the passage of persons or vehicles, is guilty of an offence and is liable, on summary conviction, to a fine not exceeding €400 or imprisonment for a term not exceeding one month or both". Another human rights issue - the notion of imposing a sanction which cannot be met - arises in that context. In the old-fashioned jurisprudence, the thinking was that one should not impose a fine without there being a capacity to pay it. In this case, it is proposed to impose a fine of €400 on a person who is begging. If they cannot pay it, they will face a month in jail. There seems to be a belief that if we look after someone for a month in jail, we will cure them of their impertinence for life. I suppose everything will go on happily, as before. No one will be slowed down. No four wheel drives will even have to slow down either. Everything will be just as it always was.

When I attended an international conference on economic development in Brazil, all the youngsters on the streets were rounded up. They used to be called the rats of the street. They were all moved out of the way so the dignitaries and the television cameras would not have to see them. It was the usual old thing we have had here, with helicopters everywhere. It is interesting that Ireland had the biggest waiting list for helicopters. We had more Mercedes cars, per head of population, than Germany. Although we have the highest number of golf courses in the world, we are terribly worried about people begging on the streets. I hope sanity will break out on Committee Stage. The Second Stage debate on this Bill has been useful because it has revealed the assumptions of many of the speakers on the Government side. We know who they will not go after as a matter of urgency in the short term, and we know who they regard as easy targets for a cheap piece of populism.

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