Richard O'Donoghue (Limerick County, Independent) | Oireachtas source

This Bill is to be welcomed, as any protection of the euro and other currencies against counterfeiting will benefit all members of the EU. There is a great importance in ensuring that the euro coin and notes are authenticated. The introduction of a criminal offence and sanctions relating to counterfeiting of the euro and other currencies will be of benefit and a knockback to criminals and crime. The only point I would like to raise is that the deadline for this Bill was 23 May 2016. Ireland is the only member state that has yet to transpose this directive. It seems that since 2002, counterfeiting of the euro has cost €500 million. What has been the impact on Ireland during this time? It is about time we have trust in our younger generation because it seems that the only way of combating crime in this country is by trusting in this generation. Why? Because their use of these information technology, IT, instruments is beyond belief. Deputy Michael Collins mentioned the young scientists a couple of minutes ago and they are coming up with ways of counteracting crime. We have all been privy to videos being put up about us that are all mixed together and untrue. A young scientist representing this country found a way of authenticating these type of videos.

The way forward for us, and it is been shown that since 2016 we are lagging behind in addressing this, is to trust in the young generation that can help us. They are miles ahead of us when comes to IT and pick it up a lot more quickly than we can. We should now entrust in education and allow them to educate us in order that they can actually help us combat crime. The amount of counterfeiting that is happening in this country may be small but the direct result for the businesses that are affected is the losing of their profits, which are minimal. When counterfeit notes go into the banking system when people are making their lodgements, the banks try to hold these notes. These notes should be brought back out, given to the person that has them, and the people should then be going to the Garda directly themselves in order to try to trace these notes to make these people accountable and to try to help the self-employed people in this country. At the end of the day that is their business and their livelihoods and we need to do whatever we can do to help.

In conclusion, I will take one minute, on a point of order from yesterday, where I saw a party yesterday going personal on another member of our Independent Group. It is absolutely disgusting when one sees a member of the Labour Party making personal comments about Deputy’s personal lives.

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