Alan Kelly (Tipperary North, Labour)

We will be supporting it 100%.

I also compliment CAB, its officers and the people who work there. They do very sensitive and dangerous work and their anonymity is important going forward because these criminals and their organisations have long views. It is incredibly important that we protect the people who work for CAB.

I want to acknowledge something that shows how politics works at times. CAB came into existence because of Ruairí Quinn, the former Labour Minister, working with the former Minister, Nora Owen, on a suggestion from then Deputy John O'Donoghue. That is how CAB came into existence. It shows that the Government and Opposition can deliver when they work collaboratively. I always remember there was a documentary about CAB - I am not sure which station it was on but it could have been TV3 - where Ruairí Quinn was interviewed. Ruairí was asked about where Nora Owen spoke to officials about the creation of CAB. The officials said they would deliberate and come back to them on whether they thought this was a good idea, to which Ruairí is quoted as supposedly saying:

You haven't [I will not use the "f" word] listened to what we said. We are going to do this and we are going to make it happen.

They did make it happen and it has been incredibly successful, so much so that many other jurisdictions look at what we do here in Ireland. In a modern, liberal society we still have the capacity to have legislation like this that works.

The changes being brought about by this legislation are very welcome and probably should have happened before. Reducing the length of time from seven to two years is a good idea. The way in which this legislation helps to freeze funds quicker is also a good idea. The people CAB is targeting and the people we support it targeting have the capacity to frustrate through the legal system. This Bill diminishes that considerably, which is excellent and will really help the work that CAB does. Therefore, we will be supporting the legislation.

I will make two brief points. In 2020, my colleague Brendan Howlin introduced an Opposition Bill, the Proceeds of Crime (Gross Human Rights Abuses) Bill, which got to Second Stage. It was based on the Magnitsky Act. For any organisation involved in any form of human rights abuses outside the State but with assets in this State, it proposed to give CAB powers to seize those assets. While this may be more complex to legislate for, it is certainly something we should come back to. We may table amendments to this Bill to achieve that. While I accept it would be complex legislation and it may not be possible at this juncture to get it legislated for, at least we can have a discussion on what would be required. I think anybody in this State would support CAB's having those powers. When an organisation or people are operating in a way which is diminishing human rights and perpetrating human rights abuses but have assets in our country, it should be possible for them to be seized as well. Obviously, it would require a formula, a methodology and the technical details of how to do that, but we should seriously contemplate doing it.

The last issue I want to raise relates to how we use the proceeds of the assets that are seized and then sold. The way in which the community safety fund is run and the process by which applications come through are too complex and arduous. The fund should have categorisations under which various groups should be able to apply. Obviously, it can be indexed by areas that are more deprived or areas that have more crime. It should not matter if they are rural or urban areas because regarding rural crime there are certain requirements for CCTV or other technologies or mechanisms that would probably not exist in a rural area that needs funding and which community groups would be able to apply for.

There have always been problems with CCTV on motorways, as I know because I brought in one of the initial community schemes. I think it took eight years to sort out data protection issues as to who is the holder of data. It was insane, bananas, ridiculous. It had the funds. This was all about high-powered motor vehicles going up and down the motorway and people wanting to monitor who was coming in and out of their communities via those motorways. It took years and nobody would own the data. Through whatever provisions are possible, maybe we could also deal with that issue. Given that there is so much monitoring everywhere now, from a legislative point of view, it should be much easier than it was in the past to deal with that so that such technologies can be put into places that need them.

I commend the legislation and I compliment the Minister and his staff. It is excellent legislation which everybody in this House should support.

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