Pádraig Mac Lochlainn (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I second Senator Conway-Walsh's proposal to amend the Order of Business.

I wish to raise the issue of the history of the State's dealing with white collar crime. It is quite shocking. There were 289 Ansbacher cases and no one prosecuted and there were 3,675 DIRT bogus accounts and no one prosecuted. In regard to the HSBC scandal, 350 Irish persons held accounts amounting to €3.1 billion in Geneva bank accounts but nothing happened. It is worth considering the words of Remy Farrell, who, as the House will be aware, is a senior counsel who often prosecutes cases for the State. He spoke out about what was going on, namely, that the Garda Bureau of Fraud Investigation was absolutely swamped a number of years back, leading to just one in ten cases it was examining coming to prosecution.

In Drennan of the ODCE spoke out and said there was just one forensic accountant working for the ODCE, and we wonder how our State came to collapse. It collapsed because of a lack of regulation and accountability. When will this Government get to grips with this? I was reading back over my contributions when I was justice spokesperson for Sinn Féin. In 2012 and 2013, I raised the issue of amalgamating all the various agencies - the ODCE, the Garda Bureau of Fraud Investigation, the Central Bank, the Criminal Assets Bureau, the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation, Revenue - so they would come together under one management to oversee the issue of white-collar crime and the State that was brought economically to its knees. This is the seriousness of this. It is not just about Seánie Fitz yesterday; people are watching a whole procession of these people walking away, getting away scot-free because of a failure to put in place a proper system. I urge the Leader to contact the Minister for Justice and Equality and ask her to come to the House to present on provisions for tackling white-collar crime so we can debate her vision and argue it through.

Finally, we need a meeting on Jadotville. The Leader knows I have held back a motion on this issue for some time. I ask that he and the Minister meet with me and Senator Craughwell and get this sorted out.