Seán Crowe (Dublin South West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

We would all agree that we need to create an environment that is aggressive in tackling those who would scam, cheat and con Irish people. Many of us who are active in our communities will be aware of the amount of drug intimidation that is going on, and it is happening daily in many communities throughout the State. What normally happens is that it normally involves vulnerable people, or maybe their sons or grandchildren, who are possibly on the edge of criminality and are involved in drugs or whatever else. I have heard cases of people having to sell their homes as a result of that. It is the nature of how the drugs scene has changed. The nature of the global and technologically advanced world in which we live in is that criminals are becoming increasingly advanced and sophisticated in their tactics for moving and hiding their money. We must rise to meet that challenge by staying one step ahead of them in our laws and approach. Everybody would agree that we need to resource properly those who are tackling this. People will mention in this debate the Criminal Assets Bureau, CAB, and the Garda National Economic Crime Bureau, and that we would allow them to be proactive in their fight against these gangs.

One of the criticisms that many people have, particularly in the drugs task forces, and which has been echoed many times down the years to various Ministers with responsibility for justice is that CAB needs to start focusing on those who are in the middle management and who are torturing communities. We hear of the Kinahans and of the other big drug barons and so on. What people want to see is those who have no visible means of income, who are displaying their wealth every day, who do not work and have never worked a day in their life but yet are buying up businesses, restaurants, garages and many companies in our communities. Businesses are being bought and run in many of our communities by gangs, both Irish and international. We probably have people going into many of these companies completely unaware that they are facilitating the laundering of the illegal proceeds of drugs.

What do we need to be doing? We need to be doing things differently. We need to allow the Garda to identify and shut down these businesses and to seize the assets and money which fund further illegal activity. We need to be much more strident and reactive in respect of those funds that are recovered as these need to be reinvested back in the communities which are affected by the daily use of drugs supplied by the drug barons. We must act much more quickly.

I will give an example of this. There has been a house in my constituency where it was supposed to have been repossessed by CAB. The person in question was involved in criminality all his life and is now dead. The house was supposed to have been repossessed by the State. This has been going on for years and at the same time people have to live beside this house which has no electricity. Generators are going day and night in the place. It is decent people who are living alongside this. We need to be much more proactive and act more quickly in this.

Other people have mentioned the mules and so on but I stress that we must do more to keep these criminals in check to counter their increasingly advanced tactics before they dominate more communities and ruin more lives.

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