Paul Bradford (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State, Deputy Kathleen Lynch, and I welcome the Bill. I trust she will be sufficiently robust to deal with the situation as outlined by Senator O'Donovan. As I listened to the Senator giving us a lovely meandering geographical tour from eyes in the sky to the dairy farms of west County Cork to the Garda station in Bandon and on to the bays of west County Cork, I was reminded of our former colleague, Mr. P.J. Sheehan, who always gave us such evocative and interesting tours of the countryside during his parliamentary career. Of course the son of the said former Deputy, who is a councillor in Goleen, was one of the people who came across that famous drugs haul a number of years ago - at least he claimed credit for having done so. Perhaps that is how the Sheehan family operated so well on the political front for a number of years.

Obviously I welcome the Bill, which further strengthens what needs to be done throughout Europe in tackling crime. Just as society has changed and Europe has changed, so has crime. Some 20 years ago if we had been discussing crime on this island and co-operation between the Garda and the then RUC, which is now the PSNI, we would have been talking almost exclusively about paramilitary crime. Sadly, some of that still exists and needs to be tackled on an ongoing basis. We now have different and, in some sense, more terrible crime, involving illicit drugs, arms dealing and prostitution, all of which need to be tackled. In the Europe of 25 years ago when we had the Berlin Wall, and the Continent was geographically and politically divided between East and West, there was a different type of threat to the security of Europe. Thankfully, that has passed, but every threat is replaced by a new threat and now organised crime, terror gangs, drugs gangs, and practitioners of all sorts of illegalities are continually threatening the individual citizens of Europe in ways that may be small or big.

In the first place the resources required by national police forces must - in so far as possible - be provided and we also need the highest possible levels of co-operation between police forces. This legislation is about ensuring that those structures are in place and I welcome it. The more co-operation we have between the police forces of Europe, the better and obviously results will be achieved. We will never get to read about many of the results because in many cases they do not bring about convictions but rather prevent crimes from being committed by warding off criminals from pursuing certain activities, which is welcome.

At the commencement of his speech, the Minister said that Europol is about making Europe safer and obviously we all support that purpose. He outlined some detail of the contents of the legislation. The previous speaker mentioned fuel laundering. I am sure Senator Whelan will speak about the matter, as it is something about which he has previously spoken in this House. Fuel laundering along the Border gives rise to huge losses to the Exchequer. It has been the cause of difficulty for many motorists, who ended up buying an inferior quality fuel necessitating costly repairs to their cars. The Revenue Commissioners are losing countless millions of euro per annum and the progress in tackling this problem has been relatively disappointing. It is great to talk about European security and co-operation at a continent-wide level, but here in our own island of 32 counties and two jurisdictions further progress is needed on fuel laundering. I would like to see the Europol resources and thinking applied in that area.

At the conclusion of this contribution, the Minister highlighted some aspects of the future of Europol.

It shows how we need to change with the changing times. He spoke of the establishment of the European Cybercrime Centre. Ten or 15 years ago, none of us could pronounce the word. Cybercrime was certainly something that one might have associated with "Star Wars" or next generation matters, but we are the next generation and we must deal with-----