Liam Fitzgerald (Fianna Fail)

I am forced to rise to request a debate on crime. A number of recent sad and high-profile crimes seem to have catapulted the Minister for Justice Equality and Law Reform to the fore as the Minister to be bashed at present. I am not here to defend him; he is more than capable of doing so himself. This debate is going completely off the rails. Crime is at a serious level and the statistics are there to prove it. A debate that would have a dimension of comparative analysis with the 1980s, when law and order simply broke down, might put it into a proper perspective. There was no law and order here during the 1980s.