Michael Collins (Cork South West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

The main point of the changes being made in this criminal justice Bill is to address how young people who commit serious crimes like murder are sentenced. Specifically, it deals with the situations where someone commits a crime as a child but is sentenced after they reach the age of 18.

We are speaking about the sentencing of young people. I was talking to a mother the other day on the phone. Her biggest fear, and the fear of all mothers with young daughters at the moment, is making sure when their young daughters are out that they are with someone, and not on their own. The danger for young women - and men, I suppose, but especially women - when walking on their own is nightmarish stuff. This is the case even during the day or when walking around their college campus, but it should not be the way. Young women and women of all ages should be able to go about their business without the worry of being attacked or raped. We need to better educate the people out there. We need to teach them to treat women with respect. This needs to be done at home from an early age and followed on into school and all the way through life.

We need to encourage young people, in whatever way we can, to get off their devices and join local clubs and voluntary groups like community alert groups and community councils, as they did long ago. All of these groups are dying a death at present in local communities because young people will not join them. That is a hugely unfortunate situation. It will lead to further difficulties down the road. I know many young people who used to get involved before. They used to visit the elderly. That is where they contributed something to society. They felt the better of it in the long and short terms when they helped their neighbours and the elderly. If they are too busy, they will not have time to be committing crime.

Unfortunately, being on these devices, a lot of people are full of and see nothing but hatred a lot of the time. It is full of bitterness. What is on the Internet and these games they have today seems to be leading young people down a very dangerous road. If you get off to a very bad start in life, it is very hard to go back on track. I often fought the argument for a local community garda to be appointed to and live in the local community because most of them used to deal with young people very efficiently. When they were getting out of place, they took them, to a point, under their wing. They spoke to their parents, crime was nipped in the bud and young people saw the error of the ways and came right.

One area where that is being shown in my own constituency in west Cork is in the Garda youth awards. I know the situation here is mostly in regard to crimes that are committed but there are young people doing very good things out there. They are being rewarded for that. I thank Damian White, Jonathan McCarthy, Don Davis and other gardaí who set this up, ran it on a yearly basis and gave young people awards for the brave things they did and for helping their communities down through the years. I think we need to set up more Garda youth awards throughout the country to reward and encourage young people and to change the mindset. The mindset is that it is very easy to do wrong, and very easy to get into bad company. It is very easy to do all those things and hard to turn it around. We must encourage anything, with any leverage we have from within here, to reward those who do things right. It sends a message with regard to all the wrong things that are happening.

All too often, we hear of violent crimes and criminals guilty of sexual or violent offences receiving suspended sentences and walking free. These light sentences often precede the guilty party committing additional crimes and causing tragedies that should have been avoidable. While it is easy to blame the judge involved, the fact is Ireland has weak sentencing laws that must be reformed. Independent Ireland's policy is that we want to increase funding for law enforcement and stop Garda station closures. We want to introduce community policing systems and greater investment in early intervention and diversion programmes. Early intervention is the cure here. The Minister can only do her bit but if we as a State can make sure that early intervention is built into the system and local gardaí are working in their local communities, we will prevent crime to a higher degree than what is there at the moment.

When I was growing up, as a young person I was involved in community alerts from the word go. I was secretary of my local community alert at a very young age. It was an education. I was not perfect by any manner of means. We are all rogues when we are young, but we were educated at a very young age on how to respect people. Respect goes a long way, and that is unfortunately missing in society a lot, I suspect, today.

My new party also wants to implement measures to ensure responsibility for parents of minors convicted of antisocial behaviour. That is a big issue here.

Parents have to be educated now too, unfortunately, because young people do not seem to understand the difference between right and wrong, but sometimes get support for it at home. That is no way to go. If we are to tackle issues, we need to make sure that parents will also come before the system and the gardaí to make sure that our young people can be brought around and understand the wrong they are doing. We want to invest in more community alert systems, neighbourhood watch schemes and business alerts. We want to ensure year-round access to criminal courts in all parts of the country. We want to reform civil liability laws to ensure that criminals cannot sue for injuries sustained during the commission of a crime and that their victims are not financially liable for damages. We want to introduce a programme that treats violence as a contagious disease. We want to introduce a focus on rehabilitation for first-time offenders, offering education, job training and therapy.

I got quite a lot of criticism for an interview I did recently because I said we were going too light on crime. I am not talking about someone going around with a bald tyre or something like that but about very serious crime. We are light on it in this country. We need to have a very serious sentence after the third time. We need to make our communities safer so that people feel safe, so a young person, a young boy or girl, walking the street feels he or she can do so safely. That is not here at present. Unfortunately, that has crept into society bit by bit because we have a general acceptance. I know we can talk about more serious violence. It is slightly outside this discussion but we saw recent crimes in Ireland where gardaí were being attacked. It sent a bad message. The gardaí need to be absolutely and 100% protected in this State. That has not been the case in recent times. They seem to be as fearful as anyone else and they should not be. They should be there to protect us but they should be protected themselves. That was let slip by this Government.

As I said, dealing with young offenders is never easy. I fully accept that. It is hard to bring in a law that will bring everybody on board. I definitely think we need to focus on getting young people off mobile phones, the Internet and so on. Parents need to get more involved with youth and young people's events, and in the community. If you want to turn crime around, that is the road to travel. If we are not going to do that, we will be faced with difficult decisions in the years to come that will be uncomfortable for any Minister or politician to have to make. At present, that is the view that I think would help to make changes in this country.

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