Ruairí Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Okay. As I said, we are in support of this. We see it as an absolute necessity from the point of view of ensuring certainty in sentencing. As I said previously, however, when we are talking about the coercion of children into criminal activity, we know that we do not have the tools that are necessary in dealing with this scenario at this point in time. The Government has spoken about a maximum sentence of five years for those who are involved in coercing children into crime. We think that would need to be looked at. We brought forward a Private Members' Bill that states such a sentence would need to be ten years. I understand that there are huge issues as to how one would go about actually proving this, and that needs to be looked at. Unfortunately, when at times we have still been using the same means of crime detection and trying to put away organised crime gangs, the fact is that they have been able to alter their operations. Half the time they have used young people and children in order to provide protection to those who run these criminal organisations, so we have absolutely failed to deal with that issue.

Anyone who has gone through any major housing estate in any town or city in Ireland realises there are communities that, at times, are absolutely under the cosh of some of these criminal gangs. There are streets and particular areas in which the drug dealer has a huge level of sway and in which kids have seen the really bad examples of normalised drug dealing for many years. The forces of the State do not have the tools, powers or capacity to be able to deal with this.

As much as we need to see the provisions of this Bill that go to rectifying an anomaly that was required to be fixed by the court, we need to look at the whole gamut when it comes to specifically dealing with gangland crime. I stated many times that an absolutely holistic approach is needed because we are talking about something which involves almost every Department, whether it is education, health, children or justice. We need to make sure we have those early interventions with those communities and families who absolutely require it. To not do so means we leave people to the justice they will not find from these criminal gangs. We will leave a situation and a circumstance in which people will find themselves within the criminal justice system at some point in time.

The problem is that it generally takes long. I have seen huge levels of work done by An Garda Síochána in dealing with particular criminals. It takes lengthy periods to put it through court. It could take three or four years. When a major criminal is dealt with, the street dealers at that point do not even know who he is because he is old news and of a different generation. That is something on which we have not, in any way, shape or form, got a grip.

We have had the Citizens’ Assembly and the Oireachtas committee. We are talking about decriminalisation and all these other particular issues. In the past week, the Irish College of General Practitioners and the Irish Pharmacy Union were before the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Drugs Use. They spoke about their support for decriminalisation of the user, but also about the fact that we do not have the framework, the settings or those-----

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