Cecilia Keaveney (Fianna Fail)

First, I commend the Garda on the massive drugs seizure this week - €10 million worth of cocaine. It shows the co-operation taking place is very important but is also working. It will ensure that people on our streets in every town and village in Ireland will have less drugs at their disposal.

I want to raise with the Leader the fact that on Friday at the Council of Europe there was a report unanimously passed looking for regulation to be brought in by national parliaments to ban the mosquito device. The mosquito device is a sonic device that is being used against young people to stop them congregating in public places and it is a breach of their fundamental human rights. The biggest difficulty is that people under the age of 25 are being focused on. Everybody is born with an arc of hearing and they can hear very high or very low. As they grow older everyone loses capacity at a particular frequency. Because we do not hear this device, we think it does not exist but there are people in the Gallery who would hear it. Whether we are going along with a nephew, niece, grandchild or child, often those children are not of an age at which they can say there is a problem because they have not got the words to articulate it and we do not hear it because we are over 25. It is a very serious issue, according to the European Youth Forum and, therefore, addressing the issue received international unanimity at Council of Europe level. I ask that we would have a debate on this issue here. Unless people are debating it they are not aware of it. Because they are not aware of it they think it does not exist and because they think it does not exist there are young people being targeted right around the country and being punished for a crime they did not commit.