Danny Healy-Rae (Kerry, Independent) | Oireachtas source

This is obviously a very serious matter and we must treat it as such. When we are talking about mitigating the life sentence for the murder of some other human being, it is serious. You always have to think of the family whose family member was taken from them by someone else, whether it was with a knife, a gun or some other means. There are two sides to this. We cannot be seen to minimise the offence just because they are under age. I would like to think that people would be treated accordingly. We always knew "a life for a life", and that is what it should mean. However, if they were not brought up properly to understand, and if there were some mitigating reasons their sentence should not be as long, certainly they would have to face the rigours of the law in the first place and earn their right to be let out sometime later on if they were behaving, and if their prospects looked good. That would, in my mind, be after at least ten years. When a family loses a family member because another human being took the life of their young fellow, their mother or their father, it is a serious matter.

I could not stand here and say the Government should treat them differently from the start. However, if they want to earn it, if recognition could be given to what they are doing after a number of years and if they undertake educational or rehabilitation courses or whatever, after at least ten years maybe something like that should be considered. I am certainly not in favour of treating them differently if they are after committing murder.

There was a mention of the minimum sentence for the murder of a police officer. Many of these officers, or gardaí as we know them, are out on the streets today without weapons to defend themselves against people who, in many cases, are not travelling without guns or knives. It is hard for a garda to defend himself if he does not have a weapon. We see all the protests up here, or so-called protests. It seems to me that most of the time, the same team are protesting every day under a different guise and under a different banner. They are there again next week and the week after. We have to deal with these fellows in a tough fashion because otherwise, it will get out of hand. I cannot see that there should be a separate case made for them at the very start just because they are under age. They did what they did but if they want to earn their right to get out earlier, let them do that and have some way of doing that.

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