Alan Shatter (Dublin South, Fine Gael)

I will share time with Deputies Catherine Byrne and James Reilly.

I would like to start by thanking the Minister for his good wishes in taking up the position as Fine Gael justice spokesperson. I hope we will be able to co-operate. I hope that co-operation would extend to the Minister taking on board constructive amendments proposed by this side of the House to Bills produced by him, and being willing to give support to Private Members' Bills that we produce in the public interest to address issues that the Government either has not had the time to address or, indeed, has failed to address regardless of time but which are urgent.

I would like to start off by saying that the principle of this Bill has the full support of the Fine Gael Party. We believe that there is an absolute public duty and a necessity to bring an end to the scourge of head shops and young people being lured into using psychoactive substances, some of which have had catastrophic effects for those who have taken them. Our critique of the Government is the length of time it has taken to produce this Bill. In 2008 and 2009, my colleagues, Deputies James Reilly and Catherine Byrne, called for legislation of this type. It has taken the Government too long to produce a general Bill to give the Garda Síochána powers to effectively close down head shops and have the full panoply of our criminal law available to them to prosecute those willing to exploit young people and sell to them substances that are undeniably harmful.

In the context of the Bill, I want to say to the Minister we welcome the fact that it is now before the House and Fine Gael supports the enactment of this Bill through the Dáil before the summer vacation, but this Bill, with all the work that has been done on it has flaws. This Bill can be improved, and Fine Gael will be tabling amendments to it. I hope the amendments we table will be dealt with constructively by the Government.

I want to illustrate just two or three of the defects in the Bill that need to be addressed. First, in the context of prohibition orders, it seems that a prohibition order may be sought by a member of the Garda Síochána in respect of a psychoactive substance for human consumption, so it has to be sought in respect of a specific identifiable psychoactive substance and the prohibition order will be to prohibit the sale of that individual substance. We have already learned by application of the Misuse of Drugs Act that these substances change and evolve, and there will be no difficulty in a prohibition order being made in respect of a particular substance and a head shop stopping selling that substance and selling alternative substances. One will get caught within the context of this Bill in the same difficulty that one has with the use of the Misuse of Drugs Act. That particular provision should be a prohibition on the sale of any psychoactive substance. One should be able to seek it in respect of the general sale of them and not simply in relation to a specific substance.

If there is to be an application to close a head shop as a consequence of the violation of a prohibition order, again it applies to the sale of a specific substance. This is seriously flawed and the reality is that if - in our view - psychoactive substances are being sold, at the same time as an application is made to the courts to prohibit their sale without the necessity thereafter for a prosecution, the courts should have the power to close down the head shop, pure and simple. A closure order under this legislation in all circumstances is dependent either on, first, a prohibition order being made, then a prosecution being successful for failure to comply with the prohibition order, or is dependent on a criminal prosecution being taken for the sale of substances banned by the legislation.

The problem with all of that is that if this Bill is enacted and becomes law at the end of July and if criminal prosecutions are taken, the courts go on vacation for the entire month of August; the District Court is on vacation for part of September. If prosecutions are taken, it may take a number of months for them to come to fruition and what we need is a piece of legislation through this House which facilitates immediate applications being made to the courts to close head shops. That should be a practical possibility. There is no particular reason legislation cannot be drafted on that basis on the acceptance of all sides in this House that these substances are dangerous, should be taken off our streets and they should be taken off our streets with haste. The problem with this Bill, albeit well intentioned, is that the route map one has to travel to bring about a closure is too long drawn out and it gives too great a leeway for those operating these shops to continue to do so. We will be bringing forward amendments to address that issue.

What I want to say to the Minister is this: we have for many years had a problem with a broad range of drugs, be they the type of substances now sold in head shops or the substances sold by the drug gangs who are taking over the streets of Dublin and the streets of Limerick and other parts of this country. I want to say quite clearly to the Minister that what we need and have still not got in this country is a fully focused co-ordinated campaign to end the gun law on our streets and to close down not just the head shops, but the drug gangs and drug barons who are responsible for destroying the lives of so many people in this country and who are bringing death and destruction to too many communities.

The Minister's legacy in the criminal justice area at the end of his term of office is going to be a legacy of what could best be described as gun law and the revolving door. The number of gangland killings in this State in the first six months of this year is a minimum of 12 and, indeed, there may be more. The streets of this city and other parts of the country are starting to resemble Chicago during prohibition time in the 1920s. We need not only to get the drugs off the streets, the head shops closed down, but we need to close down the drug gangs who are ravaging the community and who feel free to use firearms whenever it suits them to engage in their murderous war of attrition with each other over the patches of the community they want to reserve for themselves in the context of the sale of drugs.

Then we have the revolving door syndrome. I have a long enough memory to remember when Nora Owen was Minister in this House and Deputy John O'Donoghue used to, from the Opposition side of the House as Fianna Fáil spokesperson, make her life miserable, and he committed Fianna Fáil to zero tolerance. In the context of dealing with the drug gangs and Michael McDowell's announcement as Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform in or about 2006 that he had finally closed them down and it was the end of their reign of terror, the reality is we have not had zero tolerance; we have had zero competence. The drug gangs are mushrooming, continue to exist, continue to terrorise communities, and this Government does not have a coherent plan to tackle the problem.

I want to pay tribute to the courageous members of the Garda Síochána who have successfully prosecuted a number of cases and put a substantial number of those engaged in drugs behind bars, but we are still not doing enough. They are still there. We had deaths on our streets within the last few days - two people gunned down who are known to have had criminal records and a young 14 year old, a victim of gun violence. This has got to stop and there has to be a coherent and a more organised approach as opposed to the fragmented approach that is taken and the sporadic involvement of the Minister in bringing forward emergency pieces of legislation.

We have had the Criminal Justice (Surveillance) Act 2009 to provide gardaí with power to gather intelligence in the face of witness intimidation and we had the Criminal Justice (Amendment) Act 2009 rushed through the Dáil so that gardaí could start bringing prosecutions against known gangland criminals. The result in 2010 in total, four prosecutions involving those pieces of legislation.

This is not good enough. It is not the focused approach we want. The people of this country deserve a far more coherent approach. While I welcome this legislation and the principle of it and it will be supported by the Fine Gael Party, yet again in tackling a major drug related problem it is a piece of legislation rushed into this House in the dying days of its sittings before the summer recess. While we will support its passage through the House by the end of next week it has to be improved and the gaps in it need to be addressed. I want, when this legislation goes through the Dáil and is being passed in the Seanad, the Garda Síochána to have armoury which allows it to make emergency court applications during the month of August before courts specially convened to hear their applications to bring about closure orders on every head shop in the country.

See this speech in context