Martin Kenny (Sligo-Leitrim, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The Bill is designed, as my colleagues have said, to ensure unscrupulous drug dealers who often use children as couriers to move drugs around can be prosecuted for it.

Very often with these children, and it has been an experience in many areas throughout the country, they get involved at a very young age in doing that and later become addicts themselves and get caught up in the whole system.

We are also aware that, in particular, in inner city areas where this is most rampant, we have the study of Dr. Johnny Connolly from the University of Limerick which was done on the south inner city where it was found that only 1% of the population are involved in this kind of criminality. The other 99% of the people who live in these areas have to put up with this scourge, and they and their children can often be the victims in getting caught up in all of it.

We want this legislation to protect children and communities to ensure we can do something that is relevant to them and will work for them. This legislation deals with only a very small part of it, but it is nonetheless a very important part. We cannot allow the situation to continue of these criminal gangs using children, coercing them and bringing them into their criminal world where they will in future become people who will have difficulties with their education, issues of drug addiction and everything else that goes with that, ending up with chaotic lives in our prison service. It is about intervening in time. One of the early interventions we need to have in respect of this is to ensure these criminal gangs are held to account for abusing children in this way.

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