Feargal Quinn (Independent)

I welcome the Minister. I have just come from a meeting of the Joint Committee on European Affairs, where a delegation from Poland served as a reminder of how European we are and why we need such legislation. I also welcome the Bill, but I wish to protest in the strongest possible terms at the delay in bringing these measures before the House.

The Bill gives effect in Irish law to three protocols to the Europol arrangements. The first of these protocols dates back to the year 2000. The most recent of the three dates from 2003. Here we are, towards the end of 2006, in our customary leisurely manner, finally getting around to putting them onto our Statute Book. What kind of a message does this send to the criminals of Europe, who are constantly adapting their techniques and strategies to evade the forces of law and order throughout the Continent by identifying the countries where they can most easily do so?

What kind of a message does it send to our partners across the EU, who must be growing rather impatient at the adamant and repeated refusal of this country to become fully involved as an integrated part of a Europe-wide system of justice? From time to time we hear offered as an excuse for delays in implementing EU directives that they need an immense amount of time and widespread consultation before Irish legislation can be put together to translate them into Irish law. That excuse will hardly hold up in this case.

This is not a complicated Bill with widespread ramifications across a raft of existing legislation. On the contrary, it is to a great extent a technical Bill, one that will not have caused the Parliamentary Counsel to lose much sleep or expend much midnight oil. Most of the pages of the Bill — 39 out of a total of 43 — are taken up with an exact, word for word transcription of the three protocols in question. In these days of cutting and pasting, it would have taken no more than three or four minutes to carry out that part of the work. However, for such a simple measure, it takes us upwards of six years to take the necessary action. Why? Can it be that the authorities consider that these protocols are of such little importance that they deserve no sense of urgency at all? Can it be that the authorities attach a very low priority to the business of co-operating with and interacting with their counterparts across the EU?

If either of these explanations is true, that is a fundamental misjudgment. It fails to take into account a growing reality that we ignore at our peril. I first became aware of the concept of Europe as long ago as 1959 — few Members in the House today would have been around at that time. I finished university and boarded a boat in Cobh for Le Havre. Spending the winter in Europe I understood, for the first time, what Europe meant. Young people my own age were excited about a united Europe and had a vision of the future even before the EEC came into being and 12 or 13 years before Ireland joined. I am not sure that the excitement of that time still exists, in Ireland at any rate. We need to show our commitment to Europe but when we take such a long time to pass legislation we send a different message.

The open borders of Europe, which we all appreciate and enjoy so much on a personal level, have greatly increased the facility with which criminals can operate across international borders. The vast steps forward in communication over the past decade, whether in cheap and frequent air flights between international destinations or in the now myriad ways of sending messages instantly and in total secrecy over the Internet, have a downside as well as obvious benefits. That downside is something that is very well known to those who lead a life of crime, but it is something that our forces of law and order have been much slower to recognise. To do its job properly now, our law and order system must keep fully abreast of these new developments.

Co-operating effectively across international boundaries should be a top priority of our national system. All the evidence, including the tardiness with which the measure before us now has been treated, is that this matter is far from being a top priority, if indeed it is a priority at all. I have the strong impression, from previous excursions into this area, that the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform is far more concerned with jealously preserving the differences between our legal system and those across most of the rest of Europe than it is in finding ways of bridging those differences in the interests of defeating crime.

In this context we see the dragging of heels in the implementation of even the simplest and most straightforward of technical measures that will bring about better co-operation. There is a lingering mindset within that Department which we have seen at work in regard to immigration matters. It is what I term a "Little Ireland" mentality, a mentality that until recently used to rejoice in using the term "alien" for anyone it felt minded to exclude from our shores. It is a mindset that thinks it can do its job perfectly well without letting the outside world impinge on it to anything more than the most minimal extent. If there ever was a time for that kind of mentality, it has long since past.

We need to develop an attitude to our neighbours that reflects the kind of Ireland in which we now live, the prosperity of which depends crucially on foreign trade, with open and free interaction across national borders. We have everything to gain by opening an enthusiastic co-operation with the forces of law and order the length and breadth of Europe and much to lose by approaching it half-heartedly, dragging our heels in the way that the timing of this Bill so glaringly illustrates. I spent my few minutes not commenting on the technical aspects of the Bill but rather urging us to commit to taking a different attitude to ensuring we become part of Europe because it would serve us well to do so.