Derek McDowell (Labour)

Senators Jim Walsh andCummins will appreciate that we are approaching the end of a debate on legislation. I do not wish to have this before the Supreme Court on an Article 26 reference. There are too many important provisions in the Bill, regarding which I had to make some conservative decisions following advice.

I have some sympathy with Senator Jim Walsh's comments. Although one can easily imagine circumstances in which there should be deviation, I agree with him that it should be in a minority rather than the majority of cases. It is very hard for me to understand why deviation is in the form of a derogation from the sentence rather than a suspensory provision of some kind. Unfortunately, I am unable to start another line of attack on the issue now.

It is significant that I told the other House how the Attorney General had advised me that it was constitutional to provide that the specific and exceptional circumstances clause no longer applied to second offences under any circumstances. That is a significant move forward. The law is being tightened up significantly, and there is also the provision on the new factors the court must take into account before it deviates from the ten-year sentence.

I will not repeat what I said here and in the other House, except to say that I appeal in all good faith to the Judiciary to consider the vast damage that drug dealing is doing to this country and ask whether these Houses have not, in their wisdom, laid down guidelines in the form of mandatory minimum sentences, with exceptions, which carry not only the force of democratically enacted law but the moral force of representing the views of the community on where the balance should be struck.

It should not be a matter of good news for this House to realise that the specific and exceptional circumstances defence now applies in only 80% rather than 96% of cases. If we heard the opposite, namely, that specific and exceptional circumstances obtained in 20% of cases, we might rest slightly easier in the belief that we were being listened to, although there is no formal channel of communication between me and individual judges. Every Member of the Oireachtas reads in the newspapers on occasion about very large sums of money and quantities of drugs being found for which someone is sentenced to five years imprisonment. As Senator Jim Walsh said, people are also given remission for good behaviour. Sometimes one must scratch one's head and wonder whether the crime's gravity has been understood.

I return to a point that I made in this House, namely, that someone who organises a cocaine party in a fashionable Dublin suburb might as well go out to the wastelands of Coolock and personally shoot someone in the head. They are just as guilty morally speaking. I do not know how we are to get that message across, which is not my individual view but generally accepted. Someone found in possession of sufficient quantities of drugs to enable that to happen must be dealt with as the flip side of those brutal shootings. They cannot be treated as if they existed in some different and parallel universe unconnected with those other acts.

Regarding Senator Cummins's amendments, Nos. 27 to 32, inclusive, and 34, if he tenders them on Report Stage in perfect form, I will accept them. There is a technical reason for my not doing so today; it would delay our procedures tomorrow. However, I thank him for tabling those amendments.

My attention has been drawn by the Parliamentary Counsel to a slight problem that has arisen on my side of the fence, namely, that in providing for a separate penalty for a second offence involving drugs or firearms, we may have undermined the maximum penalty of life imprisonment. I wish to tie up that technicality by way of an amendment. We may have failed to mention the term "life imprisonment" in respect of the second offence, which would be rather anomalous if it were available for the first. I wish to ensure that I have not overlooked another loophole, and I will tender an amendment to that effect tomorrow.