Feargal Quinn (Independent)

I welcome the Minister. I have listened to what he has said with great interest but do not like percentages, I get a better feeling from real numbers. There were 9,695 assaults, 23,000 incidents of threatening, abusive or insulting behaviour, 35,000 incidents of public drunkenness and 10,000 cases of failure to comply with garda directions. Those are just some of the figures and they are horrific. I had no idea that we were talking about such large numbers. I am shaken by it.

Who is responsible for this? Too many of us shelve responsibility to someone else because there is no easy answer. In one of my first supermarkets, 30 years ago, I told the employees that I would trust them because I believed that if I trusted a person, he or she would not misbehave. One day three 17 year old check out operators were caught stealing. They were reported to the Garda and when they returned that evening, they looked me in the eye and told me it was my fault, I had made it too easy for them to steal. I felt very guilty about that because I felt I was responsible for their having a criminal record. I thought it over and realised there was no one answer to this, trust on its own was not enough. We then put a system of training in place that pointed out the ways a person could steal and the controls we had put in place to make sure he or she would be caught. While we must trust people and have confidence in them, we must also be sure that, as Roosevelt said, we speak softly but carry a big stick.

Who is responsible? Society has a responsibility but often I read a committee has been formed to deal with a problem and the first thing it does is send a delegation to Dublin for Government help. That is not taking responsibility. PULSE and CCTV are good examples of the State taking responsibility and technology helping but what about community responsibility? I was chairman of an adjudication committee for the community alert and neighbourhood watch schemes. Those are marvellous systems where local communities come together with the Garda to look at the problems in their own area. If they see something going wrong, they take responsibility and make sure behaviour in the area is in the hands of those who live there.

Senator Ormonde's words about parental responsibility were emotive. Clearly, there is parental responsibility. British figures were published recently about the number of 12 to 15 year olds breaking the law and the parents do not seem to have any control. It comes down to education. We debated this two months ago when I spoke of the need to invest in education in order that those children who have no parental guidance learn about a sense of responsibility.