Brendan Ryan (Labour)

I am usually rude but I wish to say the Minister of State is welcome. The fact that he ran away, so to speak, from a few of the hard questions is perhaps understandable. Given all the kind words he used about the Labour Party motion, it is not clear to me the reason there must be an amendment, or one of this scale, to the motion but we will live with that.

There is a fundamental issue to be dealt with in terms of young people, the law and juvenile crime. It is easy for some of the trumpeting journalists who preach to the politicians about juvenile crime to portray it as if it were something perpetrated overwhelmingly by hulking 17 and a half year olds who are essentially distinguished by their birth certificate from tough guy crimes. We are talking not only about the 16 year olds or 17 year olds but children aged five to seven who come into contact with the law, children who are under the extraordinarily and quite primitive age of criminal responsibility. There are also offenders in the seven to 12 years age bracket. First and foremost these are children. That does not necessarily mean they are easy to deal with or that they are delightful little angels; it simply means they are children. The consensus in the Oireachtas was that 12 years of age was the appropriate age below which children should be treated as children, as people who cannot be seen as being personally culpable and responsible in the way that an adult or a mature young person could be regarded as being culpable and responsible for their actions.

It is easy to produce an exception to say that we should not have a principle in place. There is a good lawyer in front of me and he is as good as anybody at finding a spectacular exception. The Bulger case is grist to the mill for the champions of one Sunday newspaper of the "hang 'em and flog 'em and lock 'em all up brigade" of crime journalism, but it is not the answer to the 99% of children who, while they are involved in activities we all know are wrong and unacceptable, are still children. It is high time we as politicians took courage in our hands and kept on saying that these are children and that we will not solve the problem by any of the usual methods. The "hang 'em and flog 'em brigade" would have us believe that there was a time when because we beat children when they were in institutions, they would behave themselves afterwards. As one who was at the receiving end of the nasty side of some of the victims of that system, it did not make them any less violent; if anything it turned them into profoundly disturbed people with absolutely no threshold of self-control because they never dealt with themselves in terms of personal choice. They were terrorised into conformity when they lived in terrorising institutions. Once they moved out of them that discipline went. The "hang 'em and flog 'em" approach, apart from the morality aspect, is extraordinarily inefficient, wasteful and wrong and it is does not work.

I am genuinely glad that the Minister of State is providing for people to engage in research in this area. The question to which I have always wanted an answer in regard to crime in this State, particularly when dealing with child offenders, is "what works?" One element that works is to eliminate child poverty. The Government, which has had unprecedented resources, has singularly failed to deal with the issue of child poverty. We can argue over how one measures poverty but, by an universal index of poverty based on medium incomes, we are in a shamefully low position. It does not have to be like that. Depending on how one measures poverty, between 16% and 20% of our children live in households with income poverty. Child poverty is as low as 2% in civilised countries and as high as 25% or 26% in that most uncivilised of places, the United States. We are much closer to the United States in this respect.

I do not suggest that eliminating child poverty will end juvenile crime. We need to ensure that children live in households which have a decent income, that they receive decent early intervention education and are educated in classes with sufficiently low pupil-teacher ratios to enable teachers to have sufficient time to do their job. The education system needs to be backed up by a proper psychological service with, as Senator Henry said, the further backup of a good child psychiatry service. The combination of the elimination of income poverty and the ending of service poverty — service poverty being that with which most of our poor children live — would bring about change.

The new rhetoric of the Government is the rhetoric particularly from the socialist wing of Fianna Fáil, of which the members of the entire Lenihan family have always been among the most notable——