Eoghan Harris (Independent)

I am grateful to Senator Hanafin for sharing his time.

I will vote against the Bill but I do so reluctantly because it has one huge merit, the indication to involve the Director of Public Prosecutions in the programme. I say this as a matter of principle because I would like to see the DPP and the new prosecuting judges involved much more deeply in the prosecution of crime. However, I do not wish to become bogged down in that detail but rather look at the wider picture before returning to this very meritorious Bill.

I commend Senator Alex White's call to make this a non-party issue. I thought the recent debate in the Dáil was very poor and it antagonised the public very deeply, whereas the debate in the Seanad has been far superior. The public simply cannot understand why, when what needs to be done is so clear, it is not done. At the detection level, the gardaí need to have a dedicated gang-bursting force; at the legislative level, they need to have new forms of legislation that accept we are living in new times. To talk about using old British common law procedures is like fighting the First World War and staring agog at a tank when the tank is proposed. The tank that was proposed a long time ago to the old rainbow coalition by Proinsias De Rossa was that we adopt the continental model of proactive prosecuting magistrates with significant powers to proactively go out and smash the gangs rather than waiting in the British common law tradition for them to commit crimes and then try to attack them. At the third level, we need Special Criminal Courts because courts can and have been intimidated in the past. The Special Criminal Court in the 1970s did not have flawless hands. The Director of Public Prosecutions needs to be involved and there is a need for a number of prosecuting judges and a new office of investigating magistrates with wide-ranging powers and a continental approach to these matters.

This is needed in particular because of a culture that has grown up in all parties. When I speak to members of the public they ask me why we cannot have police powers and why a police superintendent cannot swear a person is a member of a gang. They ask why there is so much objection to selective internment of gangland bosses. I do not have an answer for them but the answer lies in the culture of three parties. It lies first in the culture of the left, which sees the criminals as victims, forgetting George Bernard Shaw's great aphorism that all Tories are criminals and all criminals are Tories. This romanticising of the criminal drags down the left-wing approach to crime and I am glad to see the Labour Party solidly parting company with this approach in recent times and taking a tough attitude to crime.

Second, there is a tradition within Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael of carrying a kind of legalistic baggage, Law Library baggage, the baggage of lawyers. I know that within the rainbow coalition in the mid-1990s it was mooted that the CAB would be a gang-smashing unit but in fact it was parlayed down to mean merely a criminal assets bureau.

I reiterate that a three-part strategy is needed. Like the public I am tired of bitty things. I am all for this Bill in principle and I acknowledge the Minister's reservations but there are merits in the Bill's provisions for the DPP. However, I deplore the tone of defensiveness. Twice in my lifetime I have seen Ministers for Justice go on radio and television and tell the public that things are all right because the gangland crime level is not the same as it is in Philadelphia or elsewhere, or fall into the hands of criminologists who try to tell us that things were worse in Hamburg in 1982. This attitude makes the public very angry because the public knows we are in a new form of warfare. This is not the trench warfare of the First World War but instead it is the warfare of the Second World War and the world of the tank. We need different kinds of law, different kinds of detection and a different and tougher approach to the rights of criminals.

It is not the first time we have faced this threat. Gangland lords are much closer to the kind of subversives we faced in the 1970s and 1980s than to any kind of ordinary decent criminal. The experience of politics should be used against them and that means Special Criminal Courts and Garda superintendents swearing them to be members of gangs, the use of the full panoply of the law and standing hard down on them as a threat to the security of the State. This should be done as part of an all-party strategy.