Gerard Craughwell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I move amendment No. 10:

In page 6, between lines 14 and 15, to insert the following:"Report by Minister

7. The Minister shall, within three months of the enactment of this Act, lay before both Houses of the Oireachtas a report on measures that will be undertaken to tackle proceeds of crime within the unregulated gambling industry.".

It is my great pleasure to welcome the Minister of State to the House and to congratulate him on his elevation, which was well deserved, I am sure.

As we move down the food chain of ensuring that no one benefits from the proceeds of crime at any level, all too often we hear of convicted criminals being properly sentenced by the courts and arriving at their designated prisons only to be fed their lunches or dinners, handed travel warrants and sent home. I am not suggesting for one moment that the mid-level criminals that the Bill is designed to hurt avail of this revolving door system to the same degree as those who might be described as petty criminals but we must be aware of the fact that the bottom feeders or petty criminals are a part of the criminal fraternity that is managed by the dons whose activities we are seeking to limit. I refer to them as "dons" because how they are behaving is akin to how mafiosi behaved previously in that they shoot people within the criminal fraternity who do not do what they ask them to do.

We must move to zero tolerance of crime. We must openly demonstrate that crime, regardless of its level, does not pay. We must hit the criminals where it hurts, that is, in their pockets. The Bill sets out to do that. Hitting criminals in their pockets means closing off all avenues available to them to launder their ill-gotten gains. Many view this Bill as going after drug barons, those who are behind the shootings about which the House sadly hears too much, but there are others operating in society's criminal underbelly. We need to hit them. We need to deal with fuel laundering, cigarette smuggling and crimes involving precious jewellery. We need to deal with the criminals that no one ever gets to hear about or see. I am referring in particular to the pimps who run sex operations throughout the country. I have anecdotal evidence of pimps who bring tens of thousands of euro to betting shops or bookies and request that the money be divided equally across all races or gambling activities on that day. In this way, they clean their money. Some of the large gambling institutions in this country are far from such and are actually banks. These criminals operate them as their banks. Criminals leave tens of thousands of euro on deposit with the large gambling institutions in question. When they need a few bob, they draw money out. When they have money, they chuck it onto the table and ask that it be stuck on every favourite for the day. In this way, they accumulate significant amounts of money.When the Minister, Deputy Frances Fitzgerald, was here last year, she advised me that the gambling control Bill was being drafted. There have been problems with it. The purpose of the amendment is to limit the illegal banking activities that are happening through the gambling world where one can take, for example, €1,000 and turn it into €800 of clean money. We must stop this.

People's lives are suffering as a result of the criminals operating on the underbelly of society about which most decent people know nothing. Nobody gets shot or injured, that we are aware of. However, I am mindful of one piece of anecdotal evidence. The criminal involved is now a guest of Her Majesty in a UK prison. He brought in young women from eastern Europe, brought them to houses in the midlands and beat them to a pulp until they saw prostitution as something that was a worthy escape from what they were suffering. He made tens of thousands of euro on the backs of these poor girls, brought it to betting shops and cleansed it. This is why I have proposed the amendment.

One cannot walk across the road to AIB or into an insurance company, stockbroker or high quality car dealer or jewellers and throw €40,000 on the table without somebody asking where one got it. However, one can do it in a betting shop. One can walk into a bookie's, put down tens of thousands of euro, walk out the door, and nobody other than the staff will ever know one did it. Nobody will question where the money came from, and one walks out of the place clean. I am not sure many people in the country know this is happening. I am not sure many people who live in the leafy suburbs of the various well-off places in Ireland are aware that people are doing this in their areas. However, I believe the anecdotal evidence has strong supporting evidence, if we only look for it, and if so, we must tackle these people.

I will go one step further. Over the past few days it has come back to me. I have been contacted from outside the House by a person who said I should go further and call for the Criminal Assets Bureau to go into these large institutions today and freeze all accounts until it is established where the money came from. If what I am being told is true, we are not talking about thousands of euro but potentially millions of euro in illegal money sitting in accounts that are, allegedly, betting accounts. If it is true, we have a much bigger problem on our hands than I thought when I first put down the amendment. I would be interested to hear what the Minister of State has to say about it.