Paul Kehoe (Wexford, Fine Gael)
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Question 119: To ask the Tánaiste and Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform the cost of advertising and promoting the recent gun amnesty; his views on whether it represented good value for money as so few weapons were handed in; if his attention has been drawn to a fact that a similar Swedish gun amnesty yielded over 17,000 guns; if he plans to have a further gun amnesty; if so, the lessons he has learnt from the recent amnesty; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [43375/06]

Michael McDowell (Dublin South East, Progressive Democrats)
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A total of €331,608.26 (inclusive of VAT) was spent on advertising and promoting the recent Weapons Amnesty. I am satisfied that the Amnesty, which resulted in the surrender of 1,002 weapons, has been a success and fully achieved its aims.

The purpose of the amnesty was to afford people an opportunity to hand in illegally held weapons at their local Garda Station before the introduction of new more stringent sentences for firearms offences which I provided for in the Criminal Justice Act, 2006. I was never of the view that large numbers of hardened criminals were going to hand over their weapons. Such criminals can only be dealt with by applying the full rigour of the law; they are and will continue to be pursued relentlessly and brought to justice. However, I did believe that there were people who had unlicensed guns and offensive weapons in their homes, who would have found it difficult to come forward or to admit that they had such weapons, and that an amnesty would afford them an opportunity to surrender their weapons safely before the introduction of the new minimum mandatory sentences provided for under the 2006 Act. I was glad to see so many people avail of the opportunity before I introduced the minimum mandatory sentences provisions on 1st November, 2006.

One cannot draw a valid comparison between the recent Amnesty here and the Swedish Amnesty in 1993. Under the Swedish Amnesty persons were allowed to hand in illegally held guns anonymously and no questions were asked, neither were those surrendering weapons required to present any form of identification or asked for their names. The basis of our Amnesty, and one which all parties agreed with in the course of the passage of the Criminal Justice Act, 2006 through the Oireachtas, was that persons would be required to give their name and address when surrendering weapons, that the weapons surrendered would be forensically tested and where a surrendered weapon was found to have been used in the commission of a crime both the weapon and forensic evidence could be used in evidence in any subsequent proceedings. To provide otherwise would, in my view, allow for the possibility that criminals would avail of the Amnesty to "dump" weapons used in the commission of crime thus making it more difficult to secure prosecutions in some cases.