Dermot Ahern (Louth, Fianna Fail)

Regarding the head of CAB, since the first appointment of the solicitor Mr. Barry Galvin, a member of the Garda Síochána has been at the head, and it is the strong view of the Garda Commissioner that a garda should be at the head.

Regarding directing operations from prisons, because of the latest technology there is no doubt that criminals are endeavouring to get mobile telephones into prisons, and there has been evidence that they have been successful in that regard. Members will be aware of some incidents in prisons, in Mountjoy and other places, where there have been riots, supposedly due to over crowding. They have not happened because of over crowding, they have happened because of the tightening of the security regime in prisons. Some high-profile cases include mobile telephones taken into prison in a cake and in the nappy of a child brought into prison. Airport security-type machines are now present in all of our prisons.

There is a diminishing population of mobile telephones in our prisons. We have been trialling, in the Midlands Prison, a very successful system to block mobile telephone signals in and around the prison. The difficulty in older prisons is the thickness of the walls. Mountjoy and Portlaoise prisons also have hospitals across the road from both of them, and blanking out mobile telephone signal has interfered with the workings of the hospital, and people living nearby. Under our telecommunication laws, the State is under a strict obligation on the blocking out of signals. A very successful pilot scheme has been trialled, and operated, in the Midlands Prison and we hope to roll out that to the rest of the prisons.

Senator O'Donovan asked about extradition. We are now party to the European arrest warrant and all the European countries party to that have the ability to extradite from other member states. Our liaison officers work full-time in all of the major locations where there are large elements of an Irish population and where there is significant drug trafficking through those centres. I assure the House that the Garda and security services are extremely adept in that respect.

The CAB was one of the first such tried in Europe. The Northern authorities quickly followed our example and set up their Assets Recovery Agency, which is now a part of SOCA in the UK. Recently, I attended a conference in Enniskillen, at which there were more than 200 policemen and revenue commissioners from various agencies, with my counterpart, Paul Goggins. There is tremendous co-operation North and South in this area.