Eoghan Harris (Independent)

I will not waste time in hand-wringing about guillotining and the rest of it. The fact that some of our contributions are terse and to the point may be valuable. This Bill is necessary but not sufficient. We will be back here again, but there is nothing particularly reprehensible about that; law is a process, not a product. We must respond to events as they occur.

As a non-lawyer, I will turn to the historical hinterland of the Bill. All western European thought about crime and punishment goes back to Plato, who thought man was born an angel, and Aristotle, who thought man was born fundamentally flawed. Aristotle said we must protect society from those members who behave like beasts. He said that without law men are beasts and that society would have to be hard enough to deal with enemies foreign and domestic. That is what the State was set up to do, to protect its citizens from its foreign and domestic enemies.

These are not essential matters in the sense that we are dealing with essences; we are always dealing with context. Thus, when the Minister says the Roy Collins murder was a tipping point, he is right because it is the context in which it took place that matters, not the essence. If a man tells one he has killed somebody, one would want to know whether he killed the fellow as part of the UN peacekeeping force in Chad or at his front door in the course of a robbery. The essential killing is not the point, it is the context that is important. The context is that the symbiosis between degraded sections of the IRA campaign and the drug culture has created a new form of gang, one whose criminal members are capable of turning up on the streets of a major city during a demonstration and photographing citizens. There is no other city in the UK or on the Continent in which this could be done. This is new and it is a threat to the safety of the State. It needs the steely face of the State to deal with it.

The context means we can introduce harsh and punitive measures and then pull back from them when we no longer need them. We did this in 1922, when it brought the Civil War to a quicker end. We did it in 1939 and it saved our neutrality from being traduced. We also did it in 1956. Each time the State went back to the rule of law and did not maintain these draconian measures. This is a special time and a special context, and special measures are required. The Minister has at least walked the walk rather than talking the talk. I wish, however, he would indicate whether he is prepared to go further, if necessary. For example, the entire legislation arises from the emergency anti-terrorist measures in our history. It is the son of the Offences against the State Act 1939, the Offences against the State (Amendment) Act 1998, the Criminal Law Act 1997 and the Criminal Justice Act 2006, and these are all sons of the Emergency Powers Act 1939 and of the political history of the State against terrorism.

Senator Cummins and others are right in saying we should treat gangland criminals as terrorists. As this Bill is the son of the aforementioned emergency legislation, I am sorry the Minister did not go the full distance and allow a detective inspector or chief superintendent to give evidence of gang membership. There are problems in this regard and that is why I have recommended again and again - I agree fully with Senator Jim Walsh in this regard - that we should move slowly between the British and the continental system. We must begin to think of a system of investigating magistrates who would head up crime task forces. These would conduct the preliminary hearings and actively interrogate witnesses, and then bring the case to the Special Criminal Court. Being lawyers, the investigating magistrates would carry much conviction with their judicial peers.

As the old saying goes, there is a lot done but more to do. Everything that has been brought in is necessary, although, as I said, I do not believe it is sufficient because the criminals will change. I hope the Minister is not prepared to stop here and that, having walked the walk so far, he will go the extra mile and treat this as a special period in Irish history similar to the beginning of the Second World War, the 1956 campaign and the emergency in 1922. This is a special emergency in modern Irish life. The combination of drugs gangs with a pathologically degraded section of the old IRA campaign, plus a recession, creates a specific set of circumstances which require the most severe measures. I hope the Minister will not flinch.