Deputy Bermingham has 25 minutes left.
Supplementary Estimates, 1979. - Vote 24: Garda Síochána (Resumed).
Debate resumed on the following motion:
That a supplementary sum not exceeding £13,381,000 be granted to defray the charge which will come in course of payment during the year ending on the 31st day of December, 1979, for the salaries and expenses of the Garda Síochána, including pensions, etc.; for payments of compensation and other expenses arising out of service in the Local Security Force; for the payment of certain witnesses' expenses; and for payment of a grant-in-aid.
—(Minister for Justice.)
I will not need 25 minutes more. I will sum up what I said on the last occasion. I said that people who are engaged in certain types of crime seem to have a chip on their shoulder, or a grudge against society. This is true in many cases. We should have some method of finding out why these people have a chip on their shoulder and why they have chosen to break the law. Perhaps some of them have good reason to have a chip on their shoulder because of the kind of society we have built up here. We should examine this and draw our own conclusions. Over the past few years—and I am not picking out any period during which any party were in power—there seemed to be more people with a grudge against society. For that reason there may be more criminals. I would ask the Minister to consider if there are ways and means of assessing why these people took that attitude in the first instance and why they went in that direction. From that study we might be able to learn a lot.
I said the Garda should be well paid. They should not be in financial need and they should be independent. They should be independent financially because they have to administer our laws. They should be above suspicion. No matter who they may prosecute, we should give them our full support in the arduous duties they are carrying out.
I talked about prisons. I want to continue in that vein with particular reference to the prison at the Curragh. The Minister had to leave the House during the debate when I was speaking about the Curragh prison. This prison was opened in 1971-72. It was the old glasshouse which was a place of punishment for members of the Defence Forces who committed very small crimes in the military sense. I would not think most of them would be considered crimes in the ordinary sense of the word by the public. They were misdemeanours under the military code. This prison was a place of punishment, usually of very short duration.
The Minister said to me previously that he is as anxious to close the Curragh prison as I am. I accept that. I want to point out that it was introduced as a temporary measure. I was not in this House at the time, but it was introduced in a temporary capacity because of destruction that had been carried out by prisoners in Mountjoy. I do not want to imply that I am giving them a title but people who referred to themselves as political prisoners were transferred at that time from Mountjoy to the Curragh. This went on through the period of a Government I supported. I am not making a political point about this. I spoke here on Estimates during their time in office in the same vein as I am speaking now. I fear that this military detention may become a permanent feature of our society. I do not think it should. There are many reasons why I feel the Curragh military prison should be closed.
I want to appeal to the Minister in a reasonable manner. There has been time, in six or seven years, to have done whatever was necessary to improve the accomodation in other prisons, or to restore it, or to provide extra accommodation if necessary, to house these prisoners. At present, 90 per cent of the prisoners held in the Curragh have no political record. They are criminals, most of them serving long terms.
The Curragh is not a suitable place for detaining prisoners, particularly long-term prisoners. I think all members of the Curragh visiting committee except myself are Fianna Fáil supporters. That committee recommended unanimously to the Minister that this prison should be closed. It is not a political issue. There may be one other member of that committee, apart from myself, who is not a Fianna Fáil supporter but they are all of the opinion that it should be closed for the same reasons I have given.
It is seven years since Mountjoy was wrecked or whatever was done that made it necessary at that time—and a Fianna Fáil Government were in power—to put these people there. This was continued by the Coalition Government. A prison was built in the Curragh during the term of office of the Coalition Government but it was never used. I have been told it is not fit for the job it was built for, but I do not know. There should be some way of closing that prison now. The Minister accepts that it is not a proper place to house long-term prisoners. I am not here to raise issues that we might raise and that many other people might raise. I have no axe to grind for any organisation or for anybody else. It is not a fit place to hold long-term prisoners. After seven years we should have some other accommodation.
Prisoners housed in the Curragh give all sorts of trouble elsewhere. They are bundled in together because it is a place where they can be kept easily; they are confined there. There are armed guards. Is it the policy of Governments to make this a permanent feature of our society—military detention of ordinary prisoners who have no political connection? If it is, it is a retrograde step.
The time has come when we must be able to provide the accommodation necessary for these prisoners. There are many drawbacks in the Curragh. We must have some deadline as to when we will close this prison, and when we will provide proper accommodation. This prison is not fair to people who join the Army to serve their country—and in Kildare we are very proud of the Army and of the Curragh. We are very proud of the work the Army have done. I know they say: "It is a job that has to be done and we have no objection to doing it".
That is the reaction of our troops and members of our Defence Forces in every area at all times. I am not saying anything against that, but this prison work is not something they enlisted to do. When a person joins the Army he joins to serve his country either at home or abroad as directed. It may be said that people are glad to do this because there is overtime involved, but I do not think that is true. These people from the governor of the prison down, have not got the kind of training that is necessary for operating a civilian prison. I am saying that in all seriousness and in all honesty, and I would say it regardless of whoever the Minister happened to be at any time.
I understand the difficulties that brought about this situation. I do not know who is to blame but I would not like to see this prison on the Curragh, which is a military detention prison, a permanent feature of our society and of our prison system. It is frustrating in many ways to be a member of a visiting committee. The authorities and the Minister, with all the advice available to them, probably know better than the visiting committees, but as a member of a visiting committee one is left with the impression of not really doing anything. These committees make recommendations in regard to parole or in regard to some amenity or facility that they feel might be helpful both to discipline and to the prisoners but they find their recommendations ignored.
There is a particular problem in regard to the Curragh in this matter because two Departments are involved—the Department of Justice, who are the overall authority, and the Department of Defence. I do not know how the two operate together but it is confusing and upsetting that the military are involved in the first instance, then the Department of Defence and, presumably, the Minister for Justice has some say in the matter.
For long-term prisoners in particular some way should be devised whereby they could have visits totally in private, even if this meant the person going in to visit had to be very rigorously searched. The least we could offer these prisoners is a visit without a warder or a military policeman listening to every word that falls from, possibly, a wife's mouth.
I am aware of the risks attaching to parole but parole can also be very beneficial. I know of one person who was on a very serious charge, not in the Curragh prison, and who had been going from Dublin to Portaoise to work on the farm. He was allowed out on parole at certain weekends and he is now in full-time employment and back with his family in his own home. The fact that we were able to do this with one or two prisoners that I know of indicates that parole could be used more and to better advantage in a lot of cases. I am not trying to say that parole should be granted to every prisoner. It is probable that some of them would avail of such facility for the purpose of absconding. But it is something that should be examined or at least tried. Even if we should make mistakes we would be trying to do something for these people.
I remember being on the board of a mental hospital where the doctor was very advanced in his thinking. His idea was to take down walls and unlock doors. At that time every door was locked and there was a big high wall so that going in there was tantamount to going into Sing Sing prison. This doctor took the line that this situation should be changed, that mental illness was a sickness, and the result of the changes he brought about were wonderful. Even if there were little mishaps on the way it was very worthwhile. Likewise, I am saying to the Minister that even if there are little mishaps with the parole system for prisoners, it might be worth taking that risk now and then to obtain the benefits which I believe come from that kind of system.
I do not want to delay the Minister but I would ask him to consider the points I have made particularly about the Curragh prison and the other ones about parole. I shall always be in agreement with the provision of any money that is needed for paying the gardai or for prisons or prison improvements.
I should like to facilitate the House and the Minister in having this Supplementary Estimate passed this evening. Therefore, I am not going to speak at any length. The problem with which we are dealing not alone affects the Republic of Ireland but affects the entire island of Ireland. I understand that the cost of security at the moment is somewhere in the region of £200 million. In the past year and nine months £4 million have been stolen by armed men. In the society in which we live, where there are so many people in need of rehousing, where there are so many people living below the breadline, it is very wrong that people, believing that they are right but misguided as they are, should continue to pursue ideals that are unobtainable through their methods. If there is no response to asking them to leave down their guns and to come into the democratic system, surely they might at least have regard to the number of homeless people living in both parts of Ireland, to the number of elderly people living alone and in bad housing conditions, to the number of elderly people living below the subsistence level and to the amount of money it is costing this State and the Northern people to fight subversives. That in itself must be a strong appeal to them to reconsider their position. If they believe in their objectives, in the unity of the Irish people, they must realise that there are other people who, while not subscribing to their methods, share that belief also; and not all of those belong to the nationalist tradition. I hope that this will be recognised and that these people will try to relate to the people of Ireland more through the democratic system than the methods they are using now—not all of them belong to the nationalist tradition. I hope they will recognise that and will try to relate to the people of Ireland more through the democratic system than the methods they are using at the moment, which, in fact, are doing more to divide the people. But that is a different argument.
In the Minister's Supplementary Estimate he refers to the Ryan Report. I would like to join with the Minister in congratulating Dr. Ryan and his committee on the manner in which they produced this report. I am not satisfied that the Minister has paid as much attention to certain parts of it as he did to others. I am grateful to the Minister for acknowledging the need in the Garda force for better pay and better conditions all round. They were very much overdue and should be welcomed by the members of all ranks in the gardaí. The Minister referred to this matter. There are still a couple of things he could easily have attended to and one of them is the necessity for someone joining the Garda Síochána to be unmarried. I think that is discrimination. Has that situation changed?
We have changed it. In the case of the 500 being recruited, it is open to married and unmarried people.
I am glad about that. The other thing which should be brought to the Minister's attention is the provision regarding a qualifying oral test in Irish. I am not anti-Irish or against the Gaelic language but it is time we realised that because a person is competent in the native language it does not necessarily mean that he is going to be a good garda. Neither does it follow that if he is not competent in the native language he is going to be a bad garda. I would like to ask the Minister how many gardai could communicate in writing or conduct a simple conversation in Irish after they have passed this test, or how much of the Irish language is used in Garda stations. It is time that we toned that down a little. We could make the same point by some other method. It is very necessary to have members of the force who are fluent Irish speakers because they must do duty in Gaeltacht areas. That is very necessary, but I do not think it should be an over-riding factor. It militates against a certain section of our people. If someone from the North wants to come down here and join our police force, of necessity he has to study the Irish language first, and then having studied it and passed the test he is never called on to use it from there on.
The number of bank robberies that have been going on over the last two years is so staggering that I cannot understand why there has not been a better attempt to recruit a greater number of gardaí. When I look at the campaign being conducted at the moment in our newspapers, on television and on radio seeking more recruits for our Army, I wonder where are our priorities. Is it our priority to have a strong Army and a weak Garda force? The Minister can turn around and say "We have increased the membership of the Garda force since we came back into office." Yes, that is true, but he must also acknowledge the fact that his party were in government until 1969 and they allowed the numbers in the force to drop to such a low level that when the troubles broke out in Northern Ireland we had not sufficient numbers to man the installations around the State, let alone protect us against subversion on either side of the Border. We are really getting back to square one. We are getting back to the strength of the force 20 years ago. Ten years ago the force was at a very low level. I remember coming into the House and inquiring from the Minister in charge in those days about the state of the vehicles which the gardai had to use and which did no credit to us. While the Garda vehicles and their technical assistance have been increased over a number of years they are far short of what they have in other parts of Ireland. I do not want to go into detail, but I would point out that the RUC are equipped with every facility to meet emergencies—and I am not talking about the emergency of violence; I am not talking about ordinary accidents that happen on our roads. The manner in which they are equipped with the facilities necessary to meet all eventualities should be noted by the Minister's Department and the Garda should be given equal facilities.
Getting back to recruiting, I do not see any reason why, now that gardai are being reasonably well paid, there should not be a recruiting drive aimed at leaving certificate classes in the schools, pointing out to them that a career in the Garda Síochána is now worthwhile and inviting them to consider seriously making the force a career.
Let us look at the whole position vis-á-vis training the gardaí. I think a recruit is given five months in a training school and eventually because of the experience he gains in the service he will become a very competent and very efficient member of the force. That is falling far short of the standards we require in a modern society. Many young men who cannot get jobs work in dance bands or on their father's farm or in their businesses for pocket money, and they cannot be expected to become efficient gardaí after a five-month training course in a training school. That is not good enough. While it may have served the purpose years ago it no longer meets the needs of the society in which we live.
I would like to see the Minister conduct a campaign basically on the same lines as the Minister for Defence is, asking young boys in leaving certificate classes in secondary schools to consider joining the police force. I would like to see the Minister setting up a cadet school where these boys could do a course much the same as the cadets in the Army. We have to ask ourselves the big question: do we want a society where the civil security or force is what we all identify with or do we want a society where at every checkpoint we will see military vehicles and men in uniform armed with guns? While these things are necessary at the moment and while people tolerate them because of their necessity, I do not think people want to see soldiers at cross-roads or at Border checkpoints asking people to open the boot or bonnet of their car or to be searched. I do not think people want to see guns in our streets. Therefore, the security which I am asking the Minister to consider at the moment is a security which is more a civil responsibility, the responsibility of the civil force, namely the Garda. Therefore, the Garda should be in greater numbers on the streets. If one wants to keep crime off the streets one must put more gardai on the streets. There are far too many young boys running around doing nothing at the moment who are seeking a career and it would not be very difficult to educate them to the ways and means of being a good garda officer. Let us face it, the standard of education of the teenager or young man in the late seventies is far above the level it was a decade or two ago. They have opportunities that their fathers and grandfathers did not have, and that is a fair start for the Minister for Justice to call on. It is a fair start for any young boy to go into a training school or cadet school and be trained in the prevention of crime. When I say the prevention of crime I mean the prevention of crime, because there is far too much emphasis laid on apprehending people instead of preventing crime. I have great praise for certain members of the Garda in County Donegal whom I know personally and we get involved in community work at every level of parish life. They are involved in football teams, community games, the St. Vincent de Paul and such organisations which help young people to overcome the frustration of not having anything to do on an evening. Many of them are doing this but there are a few of them who are downright lazy. They should be shown a new direction about getting involved. It is not serving any purpose to catch a young boy after he has committed a crime but it is serving a purpose if we can prevent a young boy or girl from committing one.
The emphasis is not as strong on the prevention of crime as it is on detection. I would like the Minister and his Department to take special note of the amount of money it is now costing us in security, the amount of money that is now being stolen by subversive groups, armed men—it is not just the ordinary criminal who is doing this, some of it may be but not all. The Minister should increase the Garda Force by realistic figures. It is not good enough to say it has been increased by 500 men. That is not adequate.
The Minister should increase Garda numbers to a level where people can go to bed at night fairly certain that their property will not be destroyed before the morning or that they will not be personally injured. Without being alarmist, I know of areas of the city and provincial towns where this happens, where old people are afraid to answer their door after dark. I know of people who are making special pleas to the Department of Posts and Telegraphs to have telephones installed in the homes of elderly relatives living alone so that they can telephone them to reassure themselves that there is nothing wrong. In the Christian society in which we live we cannot close our eyes to such happenings and hope that tomorrow they will go away. We have to do something about it. If more money is needed I believe our people will be prepared to pay. There are too many boys and girls seeking positions in life at present, too many unemployed people anxious to make a contribution to improving our society. I do not see why the Minister should not open his doors and say: "Let us think afresh; let us be imaginative about the numbers we require and employ young boys in great numbers to provide better security." I do not want to see military vehicles at any check-points in the Republic or in the North. That is symptomatic of a society in which there is unrest. Unless the civil powers do something about it, unless the Government give a lead, the necessity to have it continues. It is so pressing and so strong that we cannot ignore it; we have to do something about it.
The only way we can remove military presence from our streets is to increase the civil force. In order to do that, it is not good enough putting an advertisement in a paper hoping to get 500 recruits because we would get 500 applications from people who are apathetic about what they are about to do. We have got to sell the idea of having good police officers to the boys who have not yet made up their minds about careers. We must get career guidance counsellors to advise them on this. Following that we must provide further educational facilities, I recommend, as other people have recommended, as, indeed, the Minister recommended when in Opposition, the establishment of a cadet school. Why we want a cadet school in the Army puzzles me when we ignore the fact that we do not have one for the Garda. I do not see the rationale of that. There should be a cadet school for the Army, but if one is necessary for the Army it is total blindness not to acknowledge that we need one for the Garda also.
The question of security also raises a matter which was reported in the press a few days ago. I was otherwise engaged and could not deal with it but I tabled Private Notice Questions to the Minister which were disallowed. They related to the import of a consignment of arms which arrived at the Dublin docks on 31 October last. It is very interesting that that should have happened because about one month earlier I was on a speaking tour of the United States and I visited Massachusetts and in Boston I was queried about a statement made by a Mr. McMullin, a former Provisional IRA member who spent about two-and-a-half years in Portlaoise. He acquainted himself with a gang called the Hughes gang whose identity is well known to the security forces, a group of bandits who were working as quasi IRA people, to line their own pockets. McMullin's statement I dismissed as pure fantasy but he stated on radio, on television, and was widely quoted in the Boston Globe, that he was responsible for and was knowingly concerned with collecting money for the purchase of arms being sent to the port of Dublin. He said there were friendly people working in the Dublin docks area which made it simple for them to bring arms in. His statement was so incredible that I dismissed it absolutely and entirely. I said I had sufficient confidence in the Garda, in the customs officers and, indeed, in the people who would be responsible for the goods going through the port of Dublin to reject absolutely the statement of Mr. McMullin.
However, on 31 October a consignment of arms arrived from the United States. They were not collected and I wonder why. Is there someone of a friendly disposition working somewhere in the port of Dublin? If there is it is the Minister's duty to get rid of him.
What is the Minister doing about that? Are investigations being conducted? In the course of my Private Notice Questions I asked if the Garda have established to whom the load of guns and ammunition recently seized at Dublin port were consigned. I asked if there was any question of a leakage of information regarding the surveillance operations mounted by the Garda on the consignment and if an internal Garda inquiry was being held to discover whether or not there was such a leakage. Finally, I asked if any prosecutions were pending in connection with the consignment.
One could be an alarmist and say there is someone there. One can look at McMullin in the United States and say that he is a troublemaker, that he is inventing those stories but which of us could put our hand on a Bible and say, "it never happened"? I could not do that and I do not think the Minister could. I do not think anybody else can. If guns and ammunition are coming through the port of Dublin every step should be taken to prevent their arrival.
I hope what I have said will be listened to. I know the Minister shares my view and will do everything in his power to follow this through. I do not want to give any credence to what McMullin said but I cannot dismiss what he said in the light of what happened since I have returned from the US and I hope that the Minister will reply when he is concluding.
The other aspect of the Minister's speech, when he introduced the Estimates, dealt with prisons. I would like to avail myself of the opportunity to congratulate Deputy Michael Keating on his contribution last Thursday and recommend that any person interested in prison life in this State should read what he had to say. He served on prison committees and is the son of a prison officer. He spoke with sincerity.
The question of the prisons falls into two categories: the condition of the prisons and the prisoners. The condition of the prisons cannot be the standard which modern society requires because they are ancient buildings. Any ancient building that I have been in does not lend itself to the comforts that we would expect for human beings locked up, irrespective of what crime they have committed, for a quarter, half or all of their lifetime. The conditions they are living in, no matter what Government are in power does no credit to us as public representatives. The conditions will have to be looked at again. This is a major task. I do not expect the Minister to resolve the problem during his tenure of office. The cost is so great that it is not possible. But a planned programme should be agreed on that would head in that direction.
There is not a great amount of money needed, when it comes to prisoners, to change our attitude towards the custody of people who have committed crimes for which they have been found guilty and sentenced before our courts. I believe to lock someone up in a jail and to ignore the fact that perhaps it was society which caused that person to break the law is an indictment of society and not the fault, in many cases, of the person who has offended the laws which govern us.
I have just listened to Deputy Joe Bermingham appeal to the Minister for a more liberal parole system. I join in that appeal. There are too many innocent people involved when someone is locked up in jail. There are too many marriages breaking down because people are locked up in jail, and also too many children without fathers for the same reason. I do not know what way a prisoner thinks. I would have hated to have a childhood without the presence of my father, or to have grown up in a society knowing that that society took my father away from me in my early years. No matter what his crime was, in my eyes he would have been innocent. If we lock a person up in jail, we are really brain-washing his family against society.
I had the privilege of listening to a black priest preach a sermon at Mass in Washington in mid-September about this subject. Deputy Moore was also present. The priest asked the congregation: "What do you think a man in jail misses most?" The priest then pointed to some of the people in the congregation, saying "Mary, what would you think? Kathleen, what would you think? James, what would you think?" He put the question to people whose faces he recognised until he ran out of names. Then he asked a few people he did not recognise. He replied by saying "Yes, I have been given all those answers". He then said that when he went to see a prisoner, a man serving life for murder, and asked him what he missed most in prison life, the prisoner had given him all the answers that the congregation had given him. But that was not what the prisoner missed most. He missed the company of children and gave his reasons why. Deprivation must be the greatest trial for anyone locked up in prison. We will have to look at the prisoner's position whether we like it or not.
Today we have a man walking into a bank, holding up the bank manager and robbing that bank. This will have to be stopped. There are people in prison who are being asked to pay because we are afraid to take a calculated risk. We brand everyone with the same label, as being the same type of criminal, motivated by the same motives as the person who shoots dead a neighbour for no reason.
I know one case in the North of Ireland concerning a young boy of 16, the son of a man who went out early in the morning to work and went to bed early. His son was a well-behaved boy, came home from school in the evenings, did his exercises, sat and watched television and, as far as his mother and father were concerned, went to bed. He did not stay in bed. His parents wondered why he was not interested in playing like any other boy of his age but remained at home. He then became restless and wanted to get out of the town he lived in. His parents facilitated him and sent him to a relative in Dublin. He was unsettled and went to London. He was 18 or 19 at the time and because of his age group was lifted by the London police because of a spot check after something happening in the North of Ireland. He was brought to a police barracks. After convincing them he was not responsible he returned to his "digs". His conscience troubled him and he returned to the barracks and admitted to planting between 40 and 60 bombs in the town in which he lived. His parents had no knowledge of it. His brothers and sisters had no knowledge of it. That young boy was taken back to Belfast and was kept in custody for ten months. However, because of the manner in which he faced the charges, all charges were dropped and he was given a five years' suspended sentence.
I have told that story because I am convinced that that boy had an opportunity to come to terms with the society in which he grew up. It was not his fault that he planted 40 or 60 bombs. It was the things young boys in that society did which made him do it. Nobody would point at him and say: "You are chicken." He became the expert, so expert that he misled his parents, people whom I regard as being a couple of the finest calibre I have ever met in my lifetime. When that young boy had an opportunity in London to think it over, he knew that he had injured society and was prepared to face the consequences. It was acknowledged that he had faced the consequences and he got a five-year suspended sentence. I wonder how many young boys—he was a Catholic, by the way; I am not sure whether he was a Provo—in Portlaoise feel the same way and are unable to say: "I am sorry." It is no great credit to us to lock them up and say: "We do not trust you because last week a bank was robbed." Young men should be given a reasonable choice, not an impossible choice, to opt out of violence and to start afresh. We are saddled with responsibility to create a society in which people can live in harmoney.
We have failed to create conditions that resolve national problems and have allowed young boys to be misguided by armchair generals. They belived they were doing right. In the circumstances we cannot chastise them. We cannot say: "You are a bad boy; you are a criminal; what you have done is unforgiveable." The cost of keeping a person in prison is very high. The cost of keeping a person in prison is a cost that we cannot afford to pay, that is, the cost of the deprivation of himself, his wife, if he has one, and his children.
I know a number of men who are involved in subversion. They are members of families that are very loyal supporters of my party and who voted for me long before the troubles started in the North. People living in Border areas have sons and daughters who keep company with boys and girls from the other side of the Border. When the British Army or the RUC go to the homes of these boys and girls for reasons that are best known to them, maybe legitimate reasons, they are resented. It would be resented if the Garda went into houses in Limerick and upset the households. I could imagine the Garda upsetting homes in Limerick. Within hours of the event, people would be parading outside the Minister's door protesting about it. They would accuse the Garda of brutality if a picture was knocked off a wall. That is the way people react. The dimension is greater if it is done by a force against which there is prejudice. If a member of a family in Donegal is keeping company with a boy or girl from the other side of the Border whose family is upset for security reasons it is only natural that the family in Donegal will side with their own family member. Once things get out of focus they go in different directions.
It is time we called a halt. It is time that we looked at the need for security with sympathy and compassion. We should spell out clearly to the men of violence that the amount of money they are forcing the taxpayers to pay to contain the violence which they are generating could be spent on providing houses and better social security entitlements, all the things which are very necessary. If we repeat the message until we become sick listening to ourselves I am confident that somebody close enough to the hardest criminal will say: "After 2,000 deaths in the North of Ireland, after ten years of bloody violence, you have not made headway and you are not going to make headway over the next ten years, even if 4,000 more people die." It is time that we talked sensibly to the men of violence and asked them to reconsider their position, to come into the mainstream of society and try to achieve their objectives through the ballot box. It is no good saying that without leaning in the right direction. We can only lean in the right direction if we learn to forgive. We have to be firm in our dealings with people who are breaking the law. Having been firm with them and locked them up, we must learn to forgive. Unless we do this we will never have the kind of society in which I would like to live. The "eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth" approach served its purpose at one stage in our history but it is no longer relevant.
No other Minister is saddled with greater responsibility than the Minister for Justice. I think the Minister for Justice needs the support of the Opposition Parties and he will get that support from me and from the party which I represent so long as he is doing the things we want him to do. I wish him every success in his fight against crime. He should not dismiss completely the things I have been saying. If he has to take a risk in bringing in a more liberal parole system that would take account of the difficulties of prisoners and their families, I am sure that everyone will support him. The Minister will have failures. People will give him the Harvey Smith sign and say, "We fooled the Minister", but there will be more people who will say, "Thanks for giving us a second chance". Many wives and children will be forever grateful if he adopts this course. I appeal to him to consider again the points I have made.
It must be a very reassuring experience for the Minister to have listened to so many fine speeches, all in their own way attempting to help him. As somebody pointed out, his job is not simply prisons and gardaí; it is the implementation of a particular point of view, the establishment of a philosophy in relation to crime, criminality, penology. In the pursuit of that he knows well that the boundaries of his responsibilities simply do not stop at the Department of Justice. I should like to join with Deputy Harte in praising the speech of Deputy Keating. It is the finest speech I have ever read on the whole question of justice, penology, crime. It was compassionate, understanding and very well reasoned. I sincerely hope it does not get buried in the Dáil Official Report and left there. I hope the Minister will appreciate that he has heard a contribution from one of his own generation which is intended to help him in his very difficult job. If it is listened to, it could greatly help him.
There are a few specific points which I should like to deal with before I get on to the more general question. First of all, the Coolock Law Centre in my own constituency gives a very comprehensive service, and has done so for a very long time, to over 60,000 people. It is now in danger of closing down because of a lack of money. I should be glad if the Minister would make a statement on the need to allow this centre to close down. The contribution which the centre has been getting from the Minister's Department will stop apparently in the new year. There is also a reduction in the amount the Minister for Health gave from £5,000 to £4,000.
This centre has been providing a very sympathetic, well-run and desperately needed service, mostly confined to women from broken homes, deserted wives and women with marital problems. While I know the Government intend to provide a free legal aid service, my attitude always in circumstances like this was to welcome the fact that a voluntary service existed, and to do nothing to stop that service, but alternatively—naturally as a person who believes in the establishment of State organisations and institutions of one kind or another—to establish a State institution. If the other withered away because the State institution was better, then it seemed to be a more natural way of dealing with the problem rather than closing down the service. I should like to draw the Minister's attention to this. Possibly he is not aware of the imminence of a closedown in this service. It will cause great unhappiness, hardship and consternation amongst the people who use it at present. If the Minister gave it an extended life until his own service is sufficiently well-organised to take over the work being done at present, that would be something. The position now is that the centre will close down in the new year. I wonder is this absolutely necessary.
My second point is in relation to the kind of prison which does not exist. This was referred to in a court case in October about the young man involved in the Ballymun hold-up. The case made by Dr. Brian McCaffrey, the consultant psychiatrist in court at the time was that there are no prison facilities or security facilities of a kind needed for this type of case. Because of the lack of the kind of psychiatric and support services that are required, Mountjoy is not satisfactory. The result is that cases of this kind—this boy was sick since the age of nine; he was a severe depressive, threatening suicide and was a high suicidal risk—go from Dundrum to Mountjoy, and from Mountjoy to Dundrum, and neither place is suited for the care of such a person.
The courts are helpless because they are dependent on the kind of institutions we establish. People are being sent to Mountjoy with the recommendation that they should get psychiatric attention. The kind that is needed is not available in Mountjoy, and the result is that they go back to Dundrum. In Dundrum one gets the kind of heavy sedation treatment which is not suitable for people who are not psychotic but just simply very emotionally disturbed, and who require a very much more complicated kind of support and care service in a hospital. It is no good pretending we are doing something for these people when we send them to Mountjoy or to Dundrum Central Mental Hospital. We are not. There is an urgent need for an alternative institution. I should like to draw the Minister's attention to the absence of that kind of institution.
I am very interested in the case arising out of the question I asked recently, the Aidan White case. I would be glad if the Minister would give us his thoughts on the protection of juveniles in custody, and what he has in mind in such circumstances. It amazes me that we do not have specific judge's rules which lay down the conditions under which a child—that is anybody under 17 years of age—can be questioned while in custody. No child is competent to defend himself while being questioned in a Garda station. It is a very frightening atmosphere. They fear the possibility that they may respond to promises made genuinely on the assumption that they can be carried out, or made in order to get a particular admission from the youngster.
We should know that when children in our society go to a Garda station they will receive the protection of the law in the form of a solicitor, and that a guardian or parent is there to listen to whatever they say, and whatever they say outside those circumstances should not be accepted in court as admissible evidence. That is such a fundamental right to have established to the knowledge of everybody that I am amazed one should even have to assert it. It appears that there is a confidential document giving the Garda instructions as to how they should behave in these circumstances. I cannot see the case for confidentiality. Why should this document not be made available to us all so that we can satisfy ourselves?
Is it a fact that we would not be satisfied with the kind of guarantees that there are to protect children from an incident such as the Aiden white case. I have to say how much I appreciate the obviously conscientious way in which the Minister pursued that case to the point where a number of gardai had to answer for their behaviour in certain aspects of the case. If we knew precisely what is the position of a child who is taken into custody then, of course, we could tell the Garda that they were acting outside their powers, and we could see that they looked after the child in the way in which we decided here in the Oireachtas, and in the way the Minister who is our nominee in the Department insists they should be cared for. I should be glad if the Minister would give his views on that particular case. I do not wish to go into detail regarding the answer he gave me on that case the other day except to say that there are a number of features which I am still not happy about, but it is possible that these can be dealt with on another occasion.
Another incident which requires more explanation from the Department and the Minister was the recent Mountjoy disturbance, as a result of which 62 people received medical attention, 26 are in hospital, there of whom are prison officers and the remainder are prisoners. The statement by the Minister was noninformative. He owes it to the public to let them know what goes on in our prisons. It is wrong that in regard to prisons, above all places, there should be an air of secrecy. I have been speaking on this matter for a long time and it amazes me that although various parties have made repeated requests to allow public representatives to visit prisons in order to assure ourselves that things are as everybody would like them to be these requests up to the present have been refused.
Obviously there is no comparison between what went on here and what went on in pre-war Germany. At the same time, the only way people can be certain that they will not be presented at some stage with facts about the way their institutions are controlled and with which they are in total disagreement is by insisting on being informed from time to time and using their public representatives to assure them that the prisons are being conducted on humanitarian grounds at least.
Mountjoy prison is 150 years old. It appears that there is presistent, perennial trouble there, or if it is not in Mountjoy it is in St. Patrick's, the juvenile prison. What is disturbing is that apparently one-sided reports are given as to what goes on in the prisons. I know there are the visiting committees and it is no good damning all visiting committees as being indifferent to what they see or by saying that they were appointed simply by a political party and that they say what the Minister wants to hear. It is surprising that over the years there have been hundreds of reports of visiting committees. Since 1933 approximately 300 reports and 28 riots have been recorded but very rarely, if ever, is a prison report or a complaint by a prisoner upheld by the visiting committee. It warrants some believing that that would be the true representation, that the cause was all on one side, that it was simply a matter of the prisoners being bloody-minded. Mr. Frank McDonnell, who is chairman of a visiting committee made the strange statement that the wanton damage to property and malicious injuries inflicted on prison officers and some prisoners could only be caused by mindless vicious individuals whose motives are solely directed towards the creation of antiprison administration propaganda. That is not the kind of partisan statement which could be said to establish any sort of credibility in the independent-mindedness of the visiting committee. I do not know whether it is his own view or whether he is making it on behalf of the committee but we all know that there must be a prisoner's point of view also. The Curragh visiting committee, who appear to be all of the persuasion of one party, except for Deputy Bermingham and another person, would seem to be discharging their duties independently in so far as they keep asking for the place to be closed down. Broadly speaking, the visiting committees appear to believe that the only report needed from them is a report telling us that everything is well, that all are very happy and well fed and that the governor is doing his job extremely well.
There was a riot in St. Patrick's in October of last year in which a number of prisoners were injured. It was alleged that certain excesses afterwards were perpetrated by prison officers but we have not had any report of any independent Garda inquiry into precisely what happened. The prisoners are all youngsters and it is no good turning our backs on this and saying it is not our business, that it is the Minister's business. We must question the Minister. I would ask him to reduce the wall of secrecy there is about the prisons. I suspect that the attitude in our prisons is changing. One can recall a debate here in which the Minister for Justice and his Opposition counterpart were discussing the merits and demerits of flogging. I admit that was years ago but we have come a long way since then. Anyone who has been listening to the speeches from both sides of the House appreciates that the Minister has backing. Let him make mistakes but he will get support. I do not think he will find himself being pilloried by any side of the House even if he errs on the side of being compassionate and humane in his attempt to administer the prisons, which is a very difficult job with security being the way it is. I should like to emphasise to the Minister that none of us has any illusion about the seriousness and the difficulty of his job. But jails are dreadful places. My only experience of them has been a couple of visits to prisoners, but it is a horrifying experience even to go inside the walls. How people live there for weeks, months or years is beyound my understanding.
It is all the more reason why we should be very careful that if people have to be isolated from society in the public interest they are given the optimum conditions for reasonable comfort. As Deputy Harte said, there is no substitute for socialisation with one's wife and family and other friends, with being able to go to pubs and meeting houses and so on. There is no substitute for that. Prison can never be anything but a terrible deprivation in many, many ways. If people have to be isolated for various reasons then we should err on the side of accepting Deputy Keating's approach to the whole idea of criminality and the subsequent attitude should be reflected in our laws.
One of the points I made before the recent visit of the Pope to this country was how little effect he would have on our society. Alas, I have not as much faith in these things as so many other people have. I must draw the attention of the Minister to the statement he made in Cabra about the business of the delinquent or the people who, as he said, live wayward lives. He said, "So often wayward lives of those who live on the margin of society" and he introduced the words "and particularly prisoners are due to the society's neglect more than their own sinfulness". I share that viewpoint totally and it is reflected in the speeches made by a number of Deputies, particularly Deputy Keating and Deputy Harte. Will the Minister in his concluding speech say if there is a general softening of attitude to the whole question of prisoners in general. I suspect there is.
I do not want to be in any way political but I was very shocked by the statement of his predecessor in office because I had listened to him in debates and I had a high regard for him. Senator Cooney did many valuable things as Deputy Keating pointed out in his speech but he made one statement about prisoners having no rights only privileges. I thought that we an extraordinarily harsh attitude to take to prisoners and it is one which I do not share. I would be glad to know what is the Minister's basic philosophy about the psycho-dynamics of the process of a shift towards criminality. One of my jobs is to look after young psychopaths and most of the literature on the subject appears to come down on the general thesis of genetic—probably genetic in its origin and then superimposed on that are the social and environmental stresses of one kind or another—deprivation of love, the institutional child, the child of the broken home, the child of divorce, of separated parents, drunken homes and so on. I am not going to go through the literature because it was quoted in Deputy Keating's speech. He referred to a number of authorities including very good work carried out by the Prisoners' Rights Association. I hope the Minister will try to lessen his apparent hostility to the Prisoners' Rights Association. They are a marvellously disinterested group of people. They may do things from time to time which annoy the Minister or his Department but the general intent there is marvellously detached and objective and motivated mainly by a sense of compassion for people who are unlucky enough to be in jail.
Most of the findings have been the same. I am not going to repeat them in detail, they are already on the Official Report. The general thesis is that criminality is predominantly a social illness, that there is the genetic factor which we are not very clear about. One of the main features is overcrowding in homes. The 50 or 100 families investigated by the Prisoners' Rights Association show that on average there were eight in a family, while the average in Ireland is 4.4. This is why I say the Minister's job is such a complicated one because it comes back to the whole question of family planning, the optimum size of a family and so on. There is no doubt in my mind that the very conservative attitude of the Catholic Church over the years in our society which has promoted the idea that there is something wrong or sinful in contraception has been the source of an enormous amount of suffering, hardship and unhappiness in these mainly slum areas where people still, unfortunately have many children greatly in excess of the number of children in other families. I am referring to the city centre areas, the Liberties, Ballymun, Summerhill, Seán MacDermott Street, all these areas.
The Deputy is going into matters that have no relevance to the Estimates before the House which deal with payment to the Garda Síochána and prison officers.
The other important point exposed is that in the kind of crime that the Minister is dealing with, and for which we are considering these Estimates which will decide how much we will pay our gardaí in order to catch these criminals, is mostly petty crime or relatively petty crime, that is stealing from cars, or shoplifting. Some 75 per cent or 80 per cent of the crimes are relatively minor crimes and the crimes which get the headlines in the newspapers and elsewhere are a relatively small part of the crimes we are dealing with. They are crimes of assault on persons which account for 3, 4, or 5 per cent. It is very important for us to bear that in mind.
It is very important for us to bear that in mind when considering the sort of hysteria which is worked up and which led eventually to the creation of the apparent need for Loughan House and the spending of £600,000 on Loughan House in which to keep 40 or so youngsters for a maximum of three years. It is like the enormous increase in the number of gardaí and the size of the Army. They are all dealing with the consequences of social failure, failures in the fabric and structure of society; a gross misjudgment of the response to the real size of the problem we appear to be dealing with. Instead of saying that the simplest thing to do is to see that people do not leave expensive cameras and radios lying around in their motor cars, that they lock them up or put in alarms or some other relatively simple solution or that shopkeepers prevent shoplifting taking place, we fall on these youngsters and convert them into criminals by locking them up in Loughan House. Alternatively, we put them in Mountjoy or Limerick. That was shown in a reply to a question which stated that we had about 30 or 40 between 1966 and 1977.
If we are going to follow this general pattern of treating these relatively minor crimes as if they are sufficiently serious to take a youngster from his home, his family and his parents, and isolate him in a prison, where it is notorious that they learn more about crime than they do about anything worthwhile or useful, then obviously we are dealing with the problem from the wrong end altogether.
The correct approach is a much more complicated one, but it is one which the Minister should make clear in his statement. He should have a different approach rather than this massive recruiting drive for more gardaí, more Loughan Houses, more Mountjoys, more St. Patrick's, more women's gaols, all repressing and negative, nothing creative at all or recognition that crime has social origins. We all know the old cliché that all crimes are crimes of society, and that is substantially true as shown in the statistics quoted by a number or Deputies in this debate.
Most of the youngsters in the Prisoners' Rights Organisation left school at the age of 13 even though they should have stayed on until 15 years. They were illiterate when they left school, there was no possibility of going to secondary school, AnCo or any of those places. The result is that they are illiterate, and unemployable. What else can they do or where else can they go? Their parents and brothers are unemployed and between 80 per cent and 90 per cent of their fathers and brothers were in gaol. Is there anyone who would survive growing up in this social milieu and not find himself facing a district justice at some time or another because he had taken a camera, a television or smashed a window? It is inevitable that these youngsters are going to end up in court and the origins having nothing to do with them at all, it is the social circumstances into which they were born. Ninety-four per cent of them expected to go to gaol in their lives.
It was interesting to hear people talking of apartheid today at Question Time, but this is the same segregation of a subculture in our society which is destined to end up in our gaols not because there is any essentially inherent badness in these people but simply because they grew up in families that are too big in overcrowded slum conditions, are unemployed and living on too little; are illiterate, uneducatable, untrainable and facing gaol.
The interesting thing is that in those circumstances gaol becomes inevitable and, therefore, is not a deterrent. Loughan House is not a deterrent to the child who has never been there. He cannot imagine what Loughan House could be like—the deprivation of freedom, the deprivation of social contact, a loving relationship or freedom on the streets. They are the problems we should be tackling. That was the basic philosophy of Deputy Keating's attempt to make us think about these things, to make the Minister make his definitive statement.
Deputy Keating stated that it was time we thought of this Estimate as a social statement which implied some basic accepted philosophy of what one believed to be right and how one believed one should act. The Minister must admit that nobody has attempted to score any political points in the debate except to praise him wherever we could praise him. He should try to recognise that his job is a very difficult one and that in solving his job he must be concerned with telling his colleagues in Education that there must be a much different child-teacher ratio in the schools in the centre city, with telling the housing people that we must have much better housing facilities for these people; with telling Industry, Commerce and Energy that we must have light and heavy industries to employ children, parents and brothers in these societies and with telling Deputy Haughey, as Minister for Health, that we must have a family planning centre so that these families will be brought down to the level of the rest of society by sensible family planning services of one kind or another.
The Minister can, if he wants, build bigger prisons, costing fortunes. It was reckoned that it is costing in the region of £20,000 a year—I would like to verify that because it is such an extraordinary figure—to keep a boy in Loughan House. Would the Minister verify that remarkable figure? It is estimated that it costs £60,000 for repairs and then with all the professional staff the total cost over three years is £2 million. There are 45 boys there making the annual cost at £20,000 per boy.
It would be better to spend all those millions on the depressed areas of the centre city. How much more useful it would be instead of condemning these young people to the appalling existence of isolation, monosexual society and all the appalling implications of that in a closed society where everybody is miserable, including the unfortunate prison officers who have to try and work in these Victorian surroundings. I believe that the Judiciary would prefer not to have to send people to jail. What are they to do? We have no community-orientated type rehabilitation schemes where the youngster could be educated to realise that he cannot go on behaving in the way he has done, that the rest of us have rights too, those of us who are fortunate enough not to be born into the conditions in which he was born and grown up, that he will be treated with understanding and will receive the support of the community if he can learn to live amongst us and adapt to the best of his ability to the general social tenets of the kind of society that we think is a good one. Could the Minister not devise some community-orientated services, which they are attempting to develop in the dreadful British prisons? They have nothing to be proud of in their prisons but now because of the gross overcrowding they are attempting to reduce the numbers in their prisons by getting the young people to carry out certain work for the community as an educative process as well as a rehabilitative one and an attempt to ameliorate the anger expressed by some of the Deputies here who cannot imagine that anyone could behave like these children. Most of our children would respond like this if they were subjected to the stresses which so many of these youngsters are subjected to. They are more to be pitied than anything else. They are very sad and very distressed. In my experience of dealing with physchopaths I have never met a happy one. They are always unfortunate, miserable people and they never get real fun out of their lives.
Another suggestion I put to the Minister is the possibility of decriminalising some of the existing offences such as prostitution, drunkenness, begging. It might help the statistics and give him a little heart in his very difficult job. I have referred on a number of occasions to the absurdity of treating homosexuality as a crime. It is an attitude to sexuality which is as natural as the colour of one's eyes or of one's hair and has nothing whatever to do with moral badness or moral turpitude. You are no finer a person because you are heterosexual than because you are homosexual. It is the source of an enormous amount of distress and hardship, blackmail, suicide and psychiatric problems in society. One of the things which would help greatly would be if that particular subject was decriminalised.
The Deputy is now advocating legislation. We cannot do that on an Estimate. He will have to get another opportunity to do it.
That is precisely why I said I would not dwell on it. I referred to it in passing. If one looks back 50 or 60 years ago it is very hard to know whether the alleged increase in crime is true or not. There is no doubt that the social changes create more unemployment. The changes that are coming not only in automation, mechanisation and the microprocesses will mean many thousands of youngsters out of work and they will create problems for society.
I would like to ask the Minister to consider giving me permission to visit the jails. I asked his predecessors for that. All one wants to do is to see and report that things are improving in the prison system. One of the disappointments of my life was that none of the Ministers of Justice who had themselves been in jail, the former Deputies Boland, McKeown, Mulcahy, seemed to have learned anything from their experience in jail. We should have a wonderful prison system because of what they had learned but this has not happened. It seems to me that there is a reasonable chance that this generation of young legislators appears to have a more kind hearted, understanding attitude, and we hope for changes from the Minister.
Nobody listening with half an ear could fail to be moved by Deputy Browne's compassionate understanding for this subject. Although he often says things which lead me to interrupt him and be discourteous to him, I have to admire what I have just heard from him. I agree very much with a great deal of it though I think that he underestimates the degree to which the State can provide rapid solutions to a problem which is an urgent one. "It does not matter who is to blame", the ordinary citizen will say when his house is broken into, or his wife assaulted, or his car stolen and vandalised. It may be that the citizen will say that society as a whole is to blame and I am willing to bear one three-millionth part of the responsibility for that. What I want to know is what is now going to happen to the young man of 16 or 17, or perhaps younger than that, as Deputy Dr. Browne said, who has done this? I do not want to be vindictive towards him, I do not want to make his unhappy situation into which he may well have been born, as Deputy Dr. Browne said, worse All I want is to try to prevent this happening again to myself or to any of my neighbours.
It seems that a great deal of the talk about the roots of crime and the way the State should approach it by-passes this central question. We are only flesh and blood. We are an imperfect race of human beings and we will never be anything but imperfect. There will be delinquents among us as there are in every system of law or society which ever existed on the face of the earth. We simply cannot sit back. We have to take some measures towards the control of deliquents. They may be measures which we take in ignorance of what we should do. I quite agree with Deputy Dr. Browne, if he would boil his views down to that simple point, that we ought to approach this subject with humility and perhaps with regret and with a sense of apology towards the delinquent who undoubtedly is a victim more than anything else. At the same time some balance has to be struck. As Deputy Dr. Browne acknowledged, other people have rights. The State, blundering and bumbling and certainly leaving a lot of room for criticism of the way it does it, has to move in in some shape or form and try to keep the minimum of order, even if it means applying blunt instruments to people who are not in the eternal sense to blame for their actions.
Of course, I regard prison, any kind of prison, as a blunt instrument. Criminologists are agreed that it is not a real deterrent in that it does not measure up well in terms of preventing people from falling into delinquency a second time. We could all, I am afraid, subscribe to the idea that society is to blame and that we must all carry a degree of culpability for the delinquencies of a very small minority. I believe that is true. That really skates past the point of what the Minister sitting over there must do to protect the vast majority of citizens who, at any one time, are not conscious of having done anything wrong in regard to the misfortune which befalls them when they themselves are the victim of criminality. So that while not belittling—far from it—the generosity and compassion in Deputy Dr. Browne's point of view, it does not offer an awful lot to a Government which is faced with these cruel problems.
I am not so sure if Deputy Dr. Browne is right in thinking that a bad upbringing alone is the determining factor in the making of a delinquent. Lots of children suffer from bad upbringings and they do not turn into delinquents. There seems to be a good deal of evidence, which Deputy Dr. Browne would be better able to assess than I am, that genetic factors are very powerfully at work. There are some clinical conditions—schizophernia is one; there are others, I believe—which are sometimes associated with criminality and which are known to be genetically determined. That fact would suggest that other forms of criminality which are not associated with a visible pathological condition may equally be genetically determined. Also studies which have been carried out for the last 50 years in various places on pairs of identical twins and non-identical twins tend to show that the concordance rate in regard to whether the twins turn out to be delinquent or non-delinquent in adulthood is far higher with the identical twins than with the non-identical sort, which suggests that since they have the same genetic composition there may be something in their unhappy inheritance which predisposes them both equally to crime. That is so, even where the concordance rates are high, even where those identical twins have been separately brought up. I agree that it happens in so small a number of cases that the statisticians over the last 50 years when they put them all together can barely run up more than a few dozen, but the concordance rates even there are very high. There are genetic factors and I do not know how to go about eliminating them. This is the one weak spot in what I heard Deputy Dr. Browne say.
In trying to determine a eugenic approach to this subject, we are in danger of toppling into absurdities, absurdities of a kind which Deputy Dr. Browne would be the first to attack and announce as the sort of thing which was associated in the last generation with fascism, namely, the sort of racial hygiene by which that State would tailor its laws in order to achieve the kind of family size and the kind of children which were likely to cause the least trouble and be of the most benefit to the State. Deputy Dr. Browne of course did not say that, and I do not want to misrepresent him, but I did understand him to say that the Catholic Church, because of its very uncompromising and inflexible teaching on birth control, had in some way a good deal to answer for on this planet by directly contributing to families of over-large size.
Here again I have to offer the House what little knowledge I have of this subject, which is very much amateur knowledge. The criminologists would disagree with Deputy Dr. Browne, if I am not mistaken. The studies which have been done suggest that it is not the size of family which predisposes to delinquency but it is conditions which, when added to a large family, create the mix out of which deliquency results. In other words, it is not so much large families by themselves that tend to turn out a delinquent or two, but it is large families living in overcrowded conditions. When you separate the classes of large families living in reasonable conditions and large families living in unreasonable conditions you eliminate the common factor, which is the large family, and you find that the factor which is associated with the criminality is the unreasonable overcrowded substandard conditions. Deputy Dr. Browne would wish to eliminate them, too, I know, and so do I, but to blame large families as such flies somewhat in the face of the admittedly tentative conclusions which criminologists have reached on this matter. Secondly, it would also remain to be explained how it is that in a country like this where large families have been very much the rule the great majority of large families do not in fact produce any deliquents among the brood. The Irish mother is blamed by the liberation movement for spoiling her sons and giving them a view of their sex role which is injurious to their wives and, in turn, to their own sons and daughters. I know she is blamed for a great deal.
The other side of the Irish mother with a large family is that she very often brings up with a struggle a large family of children who are devoted to herself and relatively devoted to each other and who do not fall foul of society in any shape or form.
This topic is prone to be exaggerated and over-driven in both directions. I do not want to do any injustice to what Deputy Dr. Browne has said, but I would very much quarrel—and it is the only thing I disagree with in what he said—with his idea that a large family size, in particular when he relates it to contraception laws or the lack of them, or to the inflexibility of the Catholic Church in this regard, is a factor in any shape or form in delinquency. Let us not forget that there is severe delinquency in countries in which there never has been any control on contraception. There is horrifying delinquency in countries in which there has been no let or hindrance on people in controlling the size of their families or, if they do not wish to have a family at all, they are quite free to use any means they wish up to and including abortion, or abandonment of their infants, any time over the past few generations. I could not go along with that argument by Deputy Dr. Browne, although I agree with most of the rest of what he said.
I had intended only to make one point when speaking in this debate and I will make it in a relatively short time. These Estimates bear on the Garda and the prison service. They bring together neatly the two services which I want to speak about in a particular connection, namely, the connection of public transparency. When we were in office, from 1973 to 1977 we went through, as I hope everyone on all sides of the House would recognise, a paroxysm of political violence which spilled into this part of the country, starting in the North, but spilling over into this side of the country. We had dozens of deaths, most of them caused by bomb outrages originating with the Loyalist extremists. Not only did we have that, but we had a non-stop succession of demonstrations, some of them a very dangerous kind, all of them of a very emotive kind. Because it is a free country demonstrations take place as a matter of course, freely, and as of right, and that is as it should be.
I want to remind the House, because these things are easily forgotten, that there was hardly a month when the National Coalition were in office and Senator Cooney was Minister for Justice that there was not a hunger strike, that there were not demonstrations of one kind or another, that there were not chaps with sour faces and black berets marching around the country terrifying children, that there were not sieges of one sort or another, that the general atmosphere was not one of absolute headon confrontation. Admittedly politicians, if they get into Government, are paid to put up with such things. I remember posters around the place attacking Deputy Cooney and Deputy Donegan, then Ministers for Justice and Defence, on the grounds that they were trying to collect money in order to increase the police force and the Army. For what purpose? They were increasing the police force and the Army in order to protect the people who elected them. I do not quarrel with the point of view that that is a thing which they should not have done.
I am trying to draw the attention of the House to the fact that all that element of protest has faded out. It is as though it had been tuned down on a wirless set ever since the change of Government. When was there last a serious picket outside a Government Department? When did anyone last see a black beret and a sour puss and dark glasses striding around the streets? When was there last a hunger strike? When was a Minister's house last surrounded by angry people? When last were there placards or public marches? When were there last epithets applied to Minister like "Cockroach Cooney"? Has any one checked on the cockroaches recently in Portlaoise? No. I believe the Minister for Justice is making as good a job of it as he can, just as Senator Cooney did, but the point I am trying to make is that for some very obscure and strange little reason that I wish I knew—I fear to think I can guess it—there is not the same atmosphere of confrontation.
It may be that the IRA and their supporters recognised in the National Coalition a Government every single member of which was absolutely committed to putting them down so far as it could be done. It may be, therefore, that they see in the present Government a somewhat less committed enemy. I do not intend any reflection on the Minister or any one of his colleagues, but it may be in that party generally and in the penumbra of support, or quasi support, or half support, or qualified support which that party enjoy, they see a kind of atmosphere in which it would be easier for them to breathe than it was under our Government. Accordingly, the confrontation has been scaled down to nothing.
It is very hard for people who have to watch the news day by day—for politicians who are interested in what journalists write; and in journalists who make their minds up about what politicians say and do—to get a prespective over a few years. I should like anyone listening to these words, or who may subsequently read them, to throw his mind back to any of the years when the Coalition were in office. There were no laws in operation then that are not in operation now, with the single exception of the Energency Powers Act which came into force less than one year before we left office at the end of 1976.
We were told from the other side of the House on that occasion that we were making the emergency up, that there was no emergency, but I do not want to reargue that matter now. We were represented as being the enemies of liberty. Why? Because we were substituting for a two day arrest which had been there for the past 40 years a seven day arrest, and no longer. Deputy Blaney and the former Deputy Boland sat as Ministers in a Government and sat, as Deputy Liam Cosgrave said, quite as mice, at a time when so-called republicans were locked up not for seven days but indefinitely, and at a time when there was a Special Criminal Court not constituted of Mr. Justice Hamilton swopping polite pleasantries with the Bar and Mr. Justice X and Mr. Justice Y, but constituted of Army officers who handed out sentences three times the length of what the Special Criminal Court have been handing down. That was done under a Government which contained Deputy Blaney and Deputy Boland who sat there quite as mice, but the Coalition were the enemy of liberty 15 years later. The Coalition were incipient tyrants because, on their tip toes and with apologies all round, they introduced a seven day arrest to enable the commission of crimes to be more fully investigated.
That is the kind of atmosphere the then Government had to face. I hope Deputy Dr. Browne would be generous enough to admit that even Senator Cooney, who is flesh and blood, with a strong streak of iron in him too which I salute, perhaps showed a sense of being beleaguered, as all the Government I worked for did in those years. Apart from ritual expressions of general abhorrence of violence, how much support did we get from the far side of the House in those years?
If an English soldier or policeman so much as put his nose across the Border even by accident, Deputy Andrews, whom I saw over there a moment ago, was on his feet wanting to know why. Yet now we are supposed to buy an air corridor of a kind evidently which goes beyond anything the Coalition had, and we are supposed to say nothing about it and, for reasons of national responsibility on which perhaps my party will one day choke politically, we are saying very little about it. That was the wind of atmosphere we had to face. That was the kind of atmosphere in which we had to run a police force and a prison service. It was the kind of atmosphere in which there was nothing too low, too unture, too savage, to say about our Government and about the people who worked for them, including the police.
There were accusations of police brutality from the moment we entered office until we left. I have not heard any recently. It may be—it is a logical possibility and since I know very little about how the police function and never sought secrets in the Coalition Government which did not concern me and, therefore, knew very little about the internal workings of the security side only except what I might accidentally hear at Government meetings—that people were brutalised in our time and that that does not happen now. It may be so. I have absolutely no knowledge that it is so, but I admit the theoretical possibility is there. Equally it may be the representations of Senator Cooney and Deputy Donegan as a pair of ogres who would eat the people if they were so allowed whereas they were men who were suffering, if anything, from an excess of zeal. That is the kind of thing we had to face, and we had to face it very much on the defensive so far as the police and the prison service were concerned. I hope that I am not letting any cat out of the bag when I tell the House that at that time without tripping them up or getting in their way or trying to make their difficult jobs more difficult I did quietly urge on a couple of my colleagues that we ought to have an independent police authority which would receive and impartially examine complaints about the police and complaints about the prison service, I would go this distance gladly and freely with people who make complaints about the police whether they are justified or unjustified, and that is that it is not satisfactory that the complaints should be investigated in the first instance by the very force against which the complaints are made.
I know that the situation was defended by the then Minister when we were in office, and we stuck together loyally as every government must, but I suppose I am not obliged to repress opinion on it indefinitely. I thought then, and quietly said so without making a nuisance of myself to men who were overworked and trying to keep the State from falling to bits, that there should be an impartial authority with the job of determining complaints against the police, and we might as well put the prison service into the same jurisdiction while we are at it. I agree that complaints about the prison service are much less frequent but they occasionally do surface—very occasionally—and there should be no reason for not subjecting the prison service to the same kind of jurisdiction. It should be an independent jurisdiction, and it should be one which has the necessary powers and facilities for making its own inquiries and its own investigations and which is not bound by the discipline of the police themselves and does not necessarily have to follow police procedures. That is not a revolutionary suggestion but, it is a particularly appropriate time to raise this point because of the tendency or the imminence of a Bill to set up the office of ombudsman. There is a lot to be said for a transparent police force, one in which the people can have confidence. I believe the people have confidence in the Irish police force and in the prison service, and I agree with Deputy Dr. Browne that in this debate, in so far as I have heard it, people have if anything been trying to express that confidence and to express their gratitude to these two services for the ugly and difficult job they do. I would like to associate myself with that sentiment as well. But it is a mistake, a factual mistake, a mistake of policy on the part of any police force anywhere, to resist a system which will expose it to a conspicuosly impartial system of investigation. It is in the interest of a force like that, that it should be and should remain beyond suspicion and beyond complaint. We can be proud that our police force is evidently free of the rampant corruption which appears to have overtaken the police in Britain. It seems to be the case every other month that a row erupts over there which shows that some unfortunate police officer or, perhaps, a series of them have given way to the temptation to accept bribes or to do things which are flagrantly inconsistent with their duty, so that scandal after scandal is the rule of the day in Britain. So if that is not the case here, I think, we can be extremely proud of it and grateful for it. In this increasingly difficult age, when more police are needed but when they are more difficult to recruit—and I wish there were more strains imposed on them—to keep the situation in such a way that we can hold our heads high nationally in regard to our police and prison service we should have an impartial system of investigation of complaints which may be made against them. I hope these will always be few and so far as possible without justification but if they exist at all it is in the interest of the police themselves that they should be seen to be acquitted, so to speak, by an impartial investigator of any charge made against them.
Let me remind the House about an incident in 1967 or there abouts which had no political connection whatever. This was before the recent waive of the IRA was ever heard of. A man who was in police custody in Cork died in his cell. The post mortem showed that he had suffered a large number of rib fractures and severe internal injuries including a ruptured spleen which is normally fatal. At the inquest the solicitor for his relatives appeared to suggest by the questioning in which he engaged that the man had been ill treated in the cell in the Cork Bridewell and that this was the cause of his death. That inquest lasted three days and the coroner's jury brought in a verdict of accidental death. The man was said to have fallen at a time before he was arrested and injured himself in this way and the coroner's jury, as it were, made light of these complaints. But the row went on. It gained in volume and the Minister for Justice at the time was Deputy Lenihan. There is nobody who can be compared with Deputy Lenihan except, I think Fouché who was a Chief of Police both under the ancien regime and also after the French Revolution and who seemed to pop up at all times and in all seasons with one kind of job or other but never too far from the action. I do not know if there is any Cabinet post that Deputy Lenihan has not held except for that of Taoiseach but he certainly has made a fair run at holding most of the others.
(Cavan-Monaghan): Perhaps he will have a shot at that, too.
I doubt if his career has anything to do with the Estimate.
He is a national institution.
Leave it at that, Deputy.
Anyway let us flash back and pick up one of the many files with his name on it. In this case it read, Minister for Justice, B. Lenihan and the file discloses that he was asked here repeatedly whether he would hold a proper judicial inquiry into the death of this unfortunate man in Cork and he said no. He did not, of course, say it in one syllable. He probably said yes but then proceeded in such a way as to make it clear that what he meant was no. He was pursued by the Press, by the Irish Association of Civil Liberties, by a lot of other mushroom organisations which came and went, by editorials in the papers, by Deputies here, by deputations from Cork and so on but he stonewalled until he literally had the whole country shouting at him. Everybody wanted a public inquiry into the death of this man for fear that there was anything in the charge that he had been ill treated by the police in such a way as to cause these physical injuries.
In the end the Minister had to give in and he did set up a judicial inquiry which consisted of Judge Murnaghan and a couple of other judges—a Circuit Court judge, Judge Conroy I think, and a District Court Justice. They sat not for three days, which was the duration of the inquest, but for three weeks and heard a very great deal of evidence which had not come out at all at the inquest. A report was produced and published. I presume it is in the Dáil Library but it was plain that the death in question had, in fact, been accidental. There was a very rare injury involved, a kind of accident-in-a-thousand, but the judicial commission were satisfied that the death had been accidental and that the man had not been kicked or pushed or bullied in any way at all by the police.
From that good day to this no more was heard about it. That was absolutely the end of the matter, and the Garda came far, far better out of that then if the matter had rested after the coroner's inquest. Both the coroner's inquest and the subsequent inquiry acquitted them. After the proper inquiry, which was geared to investigate such a thing, there was never a whisper about that case. It is blotted from the public memory, and rightly so.
The result of that whole episode, now 12 years old or thereabouts, should bring home to everybody that the police are the principal beneficiaries of a transparent system of investigation. If we are going to have an ombudsman—and I cannot guess what will be the terms of their Bill—I would urge them expressly to include in that Bill a provision which subjects the doings of the police and the prison service to the jurisdiction of the ombudsman. I am saying that because it is in the interests of the police and in the interest of the public confidence in the police that there should be an impartial official, a person who is not answerable to any Minister, who cannot be fired by a Minister or by the Government, but who presumably will have a tenure comparable with that of a judge and who will have an adequate staff of assistants and adequate machinery at his disposal for investigating everything. I urge that the Minister who is in charge of the ombudsman proposal should incorporate an express provision to that effect in the Bill. If it is not in the Bill when it arrives, I am going to try and get my party to put down an amendment to that effect.
I am sure everyone in the House is bored with hearing me complain about our national failing, of which the party opposite are the best examples in everything they do, of taking our tone from the English from whom we were supposed to want to be free. The English have a Parliamentary Commissioner who would not suit Irish conditions. Local government is excluded from his purview and if that were taken out of the purview of the Irish ombudsman he would not be worth anything to us. Matters of discretion are taken out of his purview, which would equally render him useless to us and the doings of the police and military are also outside his purview.
We will have a debate on the ombudsman later in the evening. Reference to that matter would be in order only as it concerns the Deputy's suggestion for the Garda.
I am sorry. I had forgotten that we will be talking about it later. The Minister and his officials may not be here when our Private Members' Bill is being discussed. I urge them to look at their own Bill in whatever shape it is and to see whether they can bring expressly under it, for the reasons for which I have given, the two services for which extra money is being sought today.
(Cavan-Monaghan): The Supplementary Estimates which we are discussing now deal with the Garda Síochána and the prison service. As the Minister wants some time to reply and wants the debate concluded before 7 o'clock, I intend to confine my remarks to the Garda Síochána vote.
We are all very proud of our police force. Ever since they were established they have worked well. The force have been noted for their integrity, efficiency and for the way they dealt with the public, whether their contact with them was from the point of view of complaints or suspected criminals. I am very pleased to be able to say that we are still very proud of the Garda Síochána, and let us hope that we will continue to get the same service from them that we have been getting over the years. I am confident that we will and I am confident that we will still be justifiably proud of that force.
I believe that the Garda Síochána are asked to perform duties for which they are not properly organised numerically or from the point of view of equipment to carry out. The number of armed robberies in this country is at a quite unacceptable level. I use that phrase deliberately. I have no wish to get into an argument with the Minister as to whether the amount of money involved is less or more or whether the number of robberies has decreased or increased. I believe that, numerically, the number of armed robberies is on the increase and I am satisfied that the amount of money involved in these armed robberies has increased substantially. Whether I am right or wrong on that, I want to say without fear of contradiction that the level of armed robberies, both from a numerical point of view and from the point of view of the amount of money involved, is at a completely unacceptable level. That is to be deplored for two reasons.
First of all, we know that subversive organisations who need arms for their illegal activities are financing those activities through armed robberies. Indeed, the ease with which banks or companies are robbed of large sums of money is tantamount to the financing of these illegal organisations by the State. It is to be deplored that these large sums of moneys, sometimes in the neighbourhood of £250,000, can be collected by armed subversives for their illegal activities. It does not stop there. Ordinary criminals, and some people who might not be classified as criminals, see that large sums of money can be collected under threat. They have no association with subversive associations, but they are in on the band wagon. They get in to collect this money for themselves. Ordinary criminals are embarking on this method of collecting large sums of money, and that is to be deplored. It is lowering respect for the law and it is encouraging crime and bank robberies. We know that if a person goes into a bank with a gun, or if he can convince the officials that he has a gun, he gets whatever he asks for. Surely that is encouraging all sorts of people to get in on this act.
Another type of crime which, I think, is detestable in the extreme, is kidnapping and holding someone for ransom in order to get money. That is a type of crime that was foreign to this country up to comparatively recent times. Unfortunately, it is creeping in now. It is one of the most detestable crimes I know of.
We know that when these crimes are committed the Garda Síochána do their best to find the culprits, and, credit where credit is due, they have been successful in recent times. They are to be congratulated for that, but we want prevention. We want it to be made more difficult for criminals to collect such large sums of money. Very large sums of money in the region of a quarter of a million to a million pounds are moved about with too much ease and little protection. There should be an arrangement between the owners of such money and the security forces. If the Minister makes an order, or introduces a law, to the effect that such amounts of money cannot be moved without notification to him, I will support him. On such notification adequate protection should be provided. It should be armed protection. About one year ago I expressed the view that the only way to deal with this sort of crime was to meet force with force. The Minister did not interrupt me in an audible manner but he seemed to be horrified that I should make such a suggestion. It is ridiculous to send members of the Garda Síochána on bandit patrol—and that is what it is—with one arm as long as the other. If it is not acceptable to send uniformed gardaí on this sort of duty then let them be unarmed, but if they are going out to protect millions of pounds in transit which can only be attacked by armed criminals it is not asking too much that the men that are put on that type of duty be armed. Indeed, recent history in this city has proved that when armed gardaí get on the job quickly enough they foiled the efforts of armed criminals, cornered them, collected them with the blood on their hands, so to speak, and the loot in their possession. There is no doubt that those apprehended will be convicted. That is evidence that arms are necessary in such cases.
We are all proud of our unarmed Garda Force and, by and large, it should still be an unarmed Force. I know the Minister has increased the armed members of the Garda for this sort of duty and that was right, but if it is necessary to bring in the Army to do this sort of protection or patrol with these large sums of money they should be brought in. We can do one of two things: we can throw up our hands and say we cannot cope, let it continue or we afford armed protection when there is a danger of armed robbery. That is sound sense and I do not think it is unreasonable.
There should be more patrols in towns where there are banks and, particularly, where there are banks which are conveniently situated from the point of view of armed robbery. We know that banks situated in the middle of long narrow streets are seldom attacked because of the hazards of getting away. The banks that are usually attacked are those that are peripherally situated in towns with the opportunity for a quick getaway. Those banks should be kept under surveillance by an armed patrol at certain times. The vulnerable times for these armed robberies is shortly after opening. The first customers are usually people who are not properly introduced but who want large sums of money. More attention should be given to the protection of those banks.
If it is going to take a lot of money to do this work it will have to be found. The Minister can throw anything he likes back at me, but if he comes into the House looking for more money for this sort of protection he will get it as far as I am concerned. It is bad for the morale of the people and it encourages criminals as well as financing illegal organisations. Then we have the other crime—I am not so sure how it can be dealt with—of kidnapping and holding for ransom. The Minister and his professional advisors should, as I am sure they are, direct their attention to whatever way that can be checked and dealt with. Naturally, if a bank manager is told that his wife or his child have been kidnapped and if a certain amount of money is not left some place within a specified time, that person will be murdered, he will, understandably, comply with their request. There should be direct communication between banks and Garda Stations. There should be some alarm that can be set off immediately and one that would indicate whether there was a kidnap involved.
I feel very strongly about the increase in the robbing of large sums of wages, from post offices. I have given views about the necessity for arms, and efficient arms, that will enable the Garda or the Army to carry out their duty.
The Minister in introducing this Supplementary Estimate compliments the commission of inquiry which he set up to look into pay conditions of the Garda. I join with the Minister's expression of gratitude and appreciation to Professor Ryan and those who carried out that inquiry so promptly and submitted their recommendations to the Minister. The Minister said that not alone did he thank Professor Ryan and his colleagues for submitting their recommendations to him so promptly, but that he was proud that the Government implemented the pay element of the recommendation with a matter of two weeks. He said that the Government were considering the other recommendations, which are quite numerous, and that they would deal with them in due course. It occurs to me that a commission never inquires into the conditions of the Garda Síochána or the methods available to them unless a pay row is brewing. When a pay row is brewing a commission is set up. The pay elements of the recommendation are dealt with promptly enough. I am afraid the other recommendations are put on the long finger. I did not have time to go carefully into the Conroy Recommendations and Report. I know the pay element of that was implemented. Perhaps the Minister will tell us if all the other recommendations of Judge Conroy and his colleagues were implemented. If not, the Government of which I was a member must take some of the blame. The Minister and his Government must take the major part of the blame. The inquiry was set up in 1968 and presented in 1970. The Minister's party were in Government until 1973. They have been in Government again now for the last two-and-a-half years. It appears that the pay elements of these reports are dealt with promptly to pacify the gardaí and to prevent industrial action of one sort or another. I sincerely hope that that will not be the way in so far as Professor Ryan's report is concerned.
I have always thought that the Garda are not nearly sufficiently trained for the complex job they have to do and for the sophisticated type of crime they have to investigate. Gardaí are given 16 weeks training in Templemore and after that they are sent off to an understaffed Garda station which already has not sufficient staff to carry out the work that it is supposed to do. They are thrown in at the deep end without any adequate training from the point of view of the code of law they are supposed to enforce, court appearances and many other things. Is there an understanding that this debate is to conclude at 7 o'clock?
There is an agreement to finish this Supplementary Estimate today.
(Cavan-Monaghan): If there is, I do not want to break it. I have not been informed. If the Minister tells me there is an understanding with my Whip that it is to conclude I will facilitate him.
There is, and that I will get an opportunity of replying.
The Deputy understands we go to Private Members' at 7 o'clock?
(Cavan-Monaghan): I believe that young gardaí are not properly trained, that 16 weeks in Templemore is utterly inadequate. I have thought that for a long time. There is an elaborate recommendation here suggesting that after the spell in Templemore, the young recruit be sent to a barracks, not as a member of the barrack's party but as an apprentice, that he be trained there for a number of weeks or months and then that he be sent back to Templemore. That sounds very good to me, and I sincerely hope that the Minister will tell us that he proposes to implement that immediately.
The last recommendation on page 122 of the Ryan Report says:
We recommend that a consultative council which was established following the recommendation by the Conroy Commission should be reactivated. Its membership should consist of representatives of four Garda associations and the Departments of Justice and the Public Service and the commissioner or his representatives. It should discuss matters relating to recruitment, the training and assessment of personnel, promotion procedures, the disparities caused by the uneven incidence of unsocial hours, payment and a high level of overtime, organisation, personnel relations and proposed changes in the force. It should have an independent chairman and its own secretary who should not be drawn from the courts or from either of the Departments represented on the council.
Does the Minister propose to implement that? In the long-term and for the harmonious running of the Garda Síochána it is an excellent recommendation.
The Minister has increased the size of the Garda Síochána. He was right to do that. His predecessor also increased the membership of the Garda Síochána substantially during his term in office. I am sure the Minister will give him credit for that. The strength of the Garda Síochána is still not adequate.
I would like to hear the Minister's comments on overtime. We used to hear a lot of criticism about curtailment of overtime. I understand that overtime has been substantially cut since the Minister took over. While, normally speaking, overtime might not be desirable, it is necessary as long as the strength of the force is inadequate. I would like the Minister to say if overtime has decreased since he became Minister.
Crime in general is on the increase. It was stated recently that 33,000 crimes were reported over a certain period. I am told that in some parts of the country crimes are simply not being reported because the gardaí seem to be unable to deal with them. I previously raised the matter of clerical assistance for the Garda and the position of gardaí who render clerical assistance, that is long serving gardai who have become very efficient as superintendents' clerks and chief superintendents' clerks. These members of the force are not properly treated. I believe they are doing a professional job. They are at least as well qualified as a senior managing clerk in a solicitor's office. They are not allowed any overtime, they are not getting special pay for week-end or Sunday work, some miserable sum like £65 is given to them as a bonus. I will not go into the details. They are men of the highest integrity, doing a very skilled job, and they should be properly paid.
I know that lady clerks are now employed in Garda barracks. I am not saying that some of them are not efficient but they are the lowest grade in the Civil Service ladder. That is not good enough. The Minister should fight with his colleague, the Minister for the Public Service, and ensure that the next grade are employed in barracks. The girls who are sent to the barracks are usually girls who have just come into the service and they are sent out without any training. Those of us who at one time or another were running offices know that it takes nearly 12 months to train a new girl. It takes that length of time for her to become accustomed to the terms used in a solicitor's office or in a Garda barracks. Therefore, it is not good enough to send down young untrained civil servants to garda barracks. When they go down the country there is nobody to train them; they either do the job or they do not.
The Director of Public Prosecutions should be as well represented in court as the defence. If the defence have a senior counsel, then the prosecution should have a senior counsel. Otherwise, the prosecution could be and sometimes is, at a disadvantage. I could say many other things but I said I would not stand between the Minister and his reply if there was an arrangement. I accepted his word that there was an arrangement. I have been told by Deputy L'Estrange to give the Minister at least 35 minutes to reply and he can have it.
I should like to thank Deputy Fitzpatrick for giving me the opportunity of replying. Deputy Fitzpatrick graciously conceded some of the time which was at his disposal and he participated in a constructive way. I am sorry that the agreement was made because I would like to have listened to Deputy Fitzpatrick. At a later stage I will take up as many as I can of the points raised by Deputy Fitzpatrick and all the other Deputies who participated in the debate. I should like to thank the Deputies who contributed to what was, on the whole, a very thoughtful and responsible debate.
I accept that the different views expressed are genuinely held by those who expressed them. I, too, would like a society in which prisons would not be necessary. I would like to think that prisons belong to the past. However I am afraid that the harsh reality of the situation is that we have not yet reached that stage. Please God, we might reach that stage some time and I would like to see it. I should like to try to bring the debate down to earth in relation to the role of prisons in our society.
Deputy Keating, who has been praised by a number of Deputies in the House, Deputies not belonging to his own party, talked about the philosophy of imprisonment. In that connection he gave an impassioned quotation from a former Chaplain of Mountjoy Prison against the whole idea of prisons. I cannot accept that we are in an era in which we can do without prisons. We must deal with the reality of the situation as we find it. What we are trying to do—and I am very keen on this myself—is to provide humane conditions for people who are deprived of their liberty because of anti-social acts. At the same time we are trying to provide them with a range of services—education, welfare and work training—which, if they choose to avail of them, would certainly help them to cope better with life on their release.
The idea of rehabilitation as the aim of imprisonment was abandoned as a concept in most countries many years ago, even in the most progressive countries like Sweden and Denmark. The medical analogy that crime is a sickness which can be treated and so lead to reform of the criminal is no longer seen as valid. It is important to remember that most prisoners, even recidivists, are serving very short sentences and that there is a limit to the support which can be given to them while in prison. A great deal of support is made available to the long-term prisoners. However, no support facilities can have any value if the prisoner himself does not wish to avail of them. On his final release, a prisoner is free and there is no means by which the supervision of welfare staff may be forced on him. Welfare staff are available to give support on a voluntary basis but unfortunately few prisoners avail themselves of the service.
Our prison system should be seen in perspective. The total prison population, which is just short of 1,200, is one of the lowest by reference to total population among western countries and is far lower than most. It should be clearly recognised and accepted that more people are under the supervision of welfare staff than are in custody.
I should like Members who contributed to this debate to know that we operate a liberal temporary or parole system and have recently introduced a scheme of intensive supervision designed to take offenders even more quickly out of the prison system and put them back in the community. I am also having to examine the question of introducing community service orders which courts could make as an alternative to orders for custody.
Having said that, it would be very unfair of me if I did not give credit to my predecessor and his predecessor—to Senator Cooney who was Minister for Justice for over four years, and to Deputy O'Malley who was also a Minister for Justice—for the tremendous work they did during their periods of office and to the staff who helped them bring about the improvements I have mentioned.
The impression may have been given that our prison system has remained static and that no improvements in buildings or facilities have been made. This, of course, is not correct. In the past decade three open centres have been established. A new ultra-modern centre, the training unit, has been designed and built specifically for the training of prisoners in industrial skills such as welding and light engineering. Arbour Hill prison has been completely renovated and extended to provide first-class accommodation facilities for longterms prisoners. Cork prison is being renovated and is about half finished. The reconstruction work on Mountjoy prison has started.
As to the future, the House will be aware that I have already announced that the building of a new women's prison and the building of a place of detention for male juveniles on a site in County Dublin are proceeding. A second male juvenile place of custody will be provided in Cork, and planning for a high security prison is proceeding. The House can be satisfied that the design and layout of these new plans will be in line with the most advanced thinking on the subject. All of these developments represent very substantial progress and should convince even the most sceptical—and there are plenty of them—that the maximum progress consistent with our resources is being made.
There have been some references to facilities in the prison system, and I should like to give a brief account of progress in selected areas. Five years ago my Department recruited a co-ordinator of work and training with a view to reorganising, restructuring and developing prison employment. It was clear that many of the traditional activities had been overtaken by more up-to-date processes. It was also clear that a much greater benefit would accrue to the prisoner in terms of training for outside employment if this reorganisation took place. Considerable progress has been made in the work training development programme. We should not forget the valuable contribution made to this by Senator Cooney as Minister for Justice and by Deputy O'Malley when he was Minister for Justice.
This programme aims to provide satisfactory employment and job training opportunities for prisoners. There are two distinct parts to the programme. First, there is the provision of employment during sentences in well-organised production workshops. Secondly there is the provision of intensive job training for those having suitable aptitudes so that they will have a better chance of getting a good job after release. The aim of the employment part of the programme is to ensure that each prisoner is actively employed during his sentence at work which will suit his aptitudes and interests and prepare him as far as possible for further job training, either later on in his sentence or after he is released, with an employer. Commercial methods of accounting are used and prisoners are involved in these procedures as they would be involved in outside employment. The work situation provides the prison officers with an excellent opportunity of helping and influencing the prisoners positively.
The second part of the work training programme, the provision of intensive job training, gives opportunities to those in custody to obtain skills which will enable them to secure employment on release, or after release. This has been introduced. Members of the House will know the training unit at Glengarriff Parade and, when fully operated, the unit will have training places for about 60 male offenders. Intensive industrial training is provided in a range of engineering skills like welding, engineering, machine operation, general engineering operations, and domestic appliance maintenance. The training courses are recommended by AnCO who assist in the selection and the training of instructors. Training is carried out in a fully equipped modern workshop in which industrial conditions are simulated. The standard industrial 40-hour week is worked. Trainees are prepared for employment at semi-skilled level in the engineering industry.
At present Arbour Hill prison has potential to provide accommodation with satisfactory employment for about 100 offenders, whilst the training unit has potential to provide 60 training places. When account is taken of those offenders who are unlikely to avail of employment and training opportunities, remand prisoners, those who show no interest, those in full time education, and so on, there is a need for about 800 additional employment training places. During 1980, it is planned to provide between 200 and 300 additional places. I know every Member of this House hopes that I will succeed in getting at least 300. We will try to do that because we recognise the need for it. We will push on and try to bring about a much-needed improvement in this area.
There were criticisms of the educational facilities during the course of the debate. During the past year or so, a number of building projects were completed which allowed for an expansion of educational facilities, particularly for adult offenders in custody. At St. Patrick's Institution offenders can avail of a very extensive education programme which includes a heavy commitment to the teaching of basic literacy and numeracy, general subjects, and craft subjects. There are also extensive educational services at Shanganagh Castle where each offenders spends half a day in the education unit. In the training unit a specially designed pre-training and prerelease educational programme was introduced recently as a pilot scheme.
The programme lasts for about three months, and it aims to equip offenders with some skills for dealing with the day-to-day problems of life after they are released: problems like obtaining a job, getting household accommodation, use of leisure time, coping with drink and leisure difficulties. It endeavours to teach offenders how to co-operate with each other, to recognise that other people's views and ideas have to be considered as well as their own, and to improve the offender's confidence in himself and his self-image. The first group have completed the course. I know Members of the House will be glad to learn that it appears to have been successful judging by the initial reaction of the offenders and of the staff. If the new scheme continues to prove successful, it will become an established part of the training youth operation and will be extended to other institutions as rapidly as possible.
In Mountjoy male prison, three additional classrooms have been provided. Courses in English, general subjects, literacy, numeracy, arts, craft work, basic cookery, laundry and hygiene are now available to the men. The long-term planning for Mountjoy prison includes the provision of a fully equipped education unit which will cater for the needs of those in custody there. In the short term, another four educational rooms will be made available in the coming months. In Mountjoy female prison, nearly all offenders take advantage of a small but excellent education unit where literacy, arts, crafts and home economics are taught in an informal setting.
The long term prison at Arbour Hill has a temporary education unit where classes are provided in English, in general subjects, arts, crafts, pottery, home economics and physical education. In Limerick prison a new education unit was opened last year and four full-time teachers are employed at present teaching literacy, general English, social studies, arts, craft work and home economics. In Cork prison, part of the classroom accommodation has been completed and four teachers provide classes in literacy, general English, general studies, arts and home economics.
Portlaoise prison presents particular difficulties because of security needs. However, during the past few years, arrangements were made for a number of men to study for the Leaving Certificate and the Northern Ireland and London O and A levels. All the necessary books and equipment were provided by my Department and an examination centre was established in the prison. Library facilities have been greatly improved for the benefit of those who do not wish to follow a specific course in education. I have introduced language tape cassettes and a video tape recording system which will allow the men to follow a range of educational programmes.
I am happy that educational facilities are being systematically expanded. The new classroom accommodation is of the highest quality and the best of equipment and teaching materials are being provided in order to help each offender who wants to improve his level of education during the period of time he spends in custody. Teachers are selected by the various vocational education committees in counties where prisons and detention centres are located. They are fully qualified and committed to the work of educating offenders. We are very glad, indeed, to have their services, and thank them.
Because of the rapid expansion of the education service I was aware that there was an urgent need to introduce an adequate structure for teachers which would give them the opportunity to meet the needs of the offenders more effectively. In this context it was unsatisfactory to have a 12-week summer holiday period. Men and women are committed to custody on an ongoing basis and the system of suspending classes for three months a year meant that some people completed their terms of imprisonment without ever having an opportunity to improve their education. However, there were difficulties to be resolved, not the least being the number of bodies whose interests were not always the same—the Department of Education, the vocational education committee, the teachers' union and, indeed, the Department of Justice. But I am glad to say that these difficulties have been overcome and that in future years a fully planned education programme extending over most of the year will be in operation. Though the agreement on the new structure was not finalised in time to get the full benefit of the new programme this summer, the period during which education was available was considerably greater than in previous years, and it is something we all welcome very much.
Library services are available in all prisons and places of detention. They are provided by the public libraries and I would like to take the opportunity of expressing my thanks to the librarians who have co-operated so willingly with my Department in order to provide a comprehensive range of books for offenders. Plans are at present being made for considerable expansion of the range of library facilities, in the Dublin places of custody initially, following recent discussions at official level between the Department and the city of Dublin libraries. The Department have requested the appointment of librarians who will be assigned fulltime to the places of custody. As well as extending the present service and providing support for teaching, training and prison office staffs, it is hoped that these librarians will engage in a substantial amount of development work among those offenders who may be uninterested in or, indeed, unable to cope with conventional books. They could, for example, show offenders how to use a library and could interview them on a one-to-one basis to identify ways of facilitating and indeed encouraging them. They could also introduce audio-visual library facilities.
Shortly after taking up office more than two years ago, I increased the established strength of the welfare service from 101 to 123 posts. This figure has now been increased to 132. Recruitment of additional staff is in progress and every effort is being made to fill those new posts as quickly as possible. The welfare service provides an essential support system to persons in trouble with the law through the probation service and in the prisons and places of custody. The training of prison service personnel is being developed all the time. The initial training course for recruitment of prison officers now extends over ten weeks, and this is followed by thorough on-the-job training. Development courses are also being conducted to the limit of resources. I have recognised that a serious limiting factor is the absence of a suitable training centre exclusively for prison staff training. Pending the provision of a purpose-built centre I have acquired premises to use as interim accommodation. Staff accommodation is being improved constantly.
I should now like to move on to some of the more specific points made during the debate. I agree fully that it is unsatisfactory to be operating the prison system by staff working overtime. I have created the required additional posts and every effort is being made by the Civil Service Commission to recruit the necessary staff. I am hopeful that the competition now in progress will supply a substantial number of recruits. I do not consider that it would be wise or justifiable to depart from the normal means of recruitment to get more staff, at least at this stage. I hope the commission will be successful and they can speed it up, but I am not prepared to change the system as of now.
Some comment was made during the course of the debate about prisoner's rights and entitlements. Let me say, firstly, that every prisoner retains his full constitutional rights while in custody. If a prisoner has a grievance he has a number of avenues for appeal. He may appeal to the governor, to myself as Minister, to the visiting committees and finally to the courts. I do not see that there is any need to add to the list by creating an additional appeals tribunal. When a prisoner misconducts himself he may be dealt with under the Rules of the Government of Prisons, 1947, either by the governor or by the visiting committee. He must be present at the hearing and may say anything on his own behalf.
Since the rules and procedures under which the prisons are administered can be subjected to public scrutiny—and frequently are—by the courts, it is difficult to appreciate the call that has been made for a more open administration. The media—newspapers, radio and television—people have been allowed to visit the various prisons, and my Department are prepared always to deal with any reasonable inquiry about the prison system and the rights of prisoners from any organisation who display a legitimate and sincere concern for prisoners. This concern, however, cannot be attributed to the so called Prisoners' Rights Organisation. The actions of that organisation and its associates have not demonstrated any real interest in the welfare of prisoners but rather a determination to bring the prison system generally to its knees and to disrupt all democratic means of preserving law and order. Incidentally, the suggestion that some members of some particular group who are critical of the prisons are contemplating legal action for defamation against a spokesman of the Prison Officers' Association must be regarded, perhaps, by some as a joke, because more than once in this House I have had to stand up and defend members of the Department of Justice from attack and defamation of character and intimidation and from their children being interfered with going to school by people who purport to belong to an organisation.
Deputy Keating raised the case of a mother who was refused permission to visit her son in Saint Patrick's Institution following a disturbance there in October 1978. I should like to explain to the Deputy and to the House the circumstances surrounding the particular case. The boy in question was one of the leaders of the disturbance and was particularly difficult. Following the disturbance all visits to offenders in the institution were stopped. The boy's mother called to the institution on the morning after the disturbance—that was 1 November—and, like all the other visitors, was refused permission to visit. But she was told that he was all right. The solicitor for the boy requested to see him in the afternoon and was told that the prison authorities would be in touch with him later. The solicitor visited the boy on the following morning and interviewed him for about an hour, but the boy was subsequently seen by the visiting committee which recommended his transfer to Mountjoy Prison.
The suggestion has been made that the management of the prisons should be given over to a board of management. This is not a new proposal. Such a development would not necessarily be an improvement on existing management and could give rise to a whole new range of difficulties. For example, staff would not know who is running the prisons. As thing stand, staff know exactly where decisions are taken which affect themselves and the prisoners. Furthermore, staff input into the running of the prisons might not be as effective as under present arrangements where the staff attend local management meetings and also meetings where prisoners' sentences are reviewed. The present system, and I have said this time and again as did my predecessor and his predecessor also, is continously under review. The developments I have outlined are ample evidence of this. I have just covered improvements over the last decade, and I have already publicly paid tribute to my predecessor, Senator Cooney, and his predecessor, Deputy O'Malley. I should hope that whoever succeeds me, regardless of which party he is from, would continue with the type of work I am doing because it is something that each and everyone of us must have a genuine interest in.
The developments that I have outlined are ample evidence of the continuing review of the system, and I would not be so naïve as to suggest that everything in the area of our prison administration is perfect. I am not suggesting that at all. There is still a lot to be done. However, I am satisfied that the standards which apply in Irish prisons compare very favourably with international standards and with those laid down by international organisations. Indeed, our standards in most respects are far superior to those in the standard minimum rules laid down at international level for the government of prisons. This is something that is not known, probably will not be mentioned by the media, but this is a fact. Probably the only area where we fall short of those rules is in relation to the segregation of prisoners and we are not alone in this. Might I say that countries far wealthier than ours have not been able to achieve the level of segregation laid down in those rules. However, when our building programme has been completed we will be in far better position in this regard.
Before I leave prisons I would like to thank all those who work in the prison service. I would like also to thank the visiting committees for the very fine job that they do. They have had a little more to do in recent years because they are normally in operation as and from the first or second week in January which I think is a good thing. I would like to thank them all very sincerely for the fine work that they are doing under difficult circumstances and to say to them that I know that there is public support for them and the type of work that they do. Efforts by anybody to denigrate them and to hold them up to intimidation will not succeed.
Deputy Bermingham of the Labour Party spoke about the Curragh prison. My thanks and appreciation must also go to those who look after that prison. We will have more about that at a later stage.
The question of armed robberies was raised. I publicly admitted here last week that the number of armed robberies continues to give cause for serious concern and I gave information in reply to questions asked by members of the Labour Party as to what the situation was at the present time. I said that there has been a fairly substantial decrease in the number of such robberies in the current year. It is amazing the number of people who spoke in the debate who did not hear what was said. I can assure the House that the situation is not one that I regard as in any way satisfactory. I am hopeful that certain steps which have been taken by the Garda will continue to effect further improvement in curtailing this type of criminal activity. However, the efforts of the Garda will not be successful unless everybody involved in the handling of sizeable amounts of cash makes a determined effort to ensure that all possible security precautions are taken. The commercial banks have old me of various measures that they are taking and, while I am satisfied that these steps will go a long way to deal with the problem of armed bank robberies, I would like to see their implementation being pursued vigorously.
There is, of course, a link between armed robberies and the activities of terrorist groups operating in this country. The proceeds of the robberies in many instances go into the coffers of the subversive organisations, and they are used by them to fuel their unlawful actions, actions which have besmirched our country's name throughout the civilised world. The measures being taken to protect cash and valuables provide only part of the answer to the problem. Unless the armed robbers are apprehended and dealt with by the courts, we will have to commit substantial resources in manpower and equipment to combat them. Accordingly, I appeal to the public to fully support the Garda in the difficult task which they undertake on our behalf and to give them every co-operation and assistance. Might I say that any suspicious activity, however insignificant it may appear, could be of assistance to the Garda. I am assured by the Garda authorities that the public response to their appeals for assistance in the investigation of serious crimes is very good and I would ask that it be even better.
The cost of security is very high. It is far higher in this State than it should be because of the continued activities of the Provisional IRA and the INLA and also the armed criminal groups who are involved in the commission of serious crime. This is a cost that the taxpayers must bear. Let us not forget that the real cost is greater still because it has an adverse effect on economic growth in areas such as tourism and foreign investment prospects. Any additional facilities sought by the Garda will be provided and I will have no hesitation in coming to this House and asking it to meet that cost. There is an open door as far as the Oireachtas is concerned in giving them anything they want that will help them to combat the subversives and to protect property and lives.
Deputy Harte asked me a number of questions, and perhaps I shall read the questions so that there will be a proper tie-up. He asked if the Garda have established the reasons why the consignees of the load of guns and ammunition recently seized at Dublin Port did not collect them, if there was a leakage of information regarding the surveillance operation mounted by the Garda on a consignment of guns and ammunition recently received in Dublin Port and if there is an internal Garda inquiry being held to discover whether or not there was such a leakage, and if there are any prosecutions pending.
In replying to these questions I have to take into account certain statements attributed to Deputy Harte in a newspaper report of 19 November in The Irish Press. The report suggested that the Deputy gave the impression that he may have information to support an allegation that some members of the Garda Síochána gave confidential information to people engaged in gunrunning. That was not at all what the Deputy said today.
I did not read that in the report.
I know, but it was read into what appeared in the newspaper. It was said in The Irish Press of 19 November, but even The Irish Press can make mistakes.
I read the report and I did not get that meaning.
If the Deputy says he did not say that the House must accept it.
I am glad that the Deputy has had the opportunity to correct the impression given because it was a wrong one and it is unfair to the Deputy. It would also be unfair to me as Minister and above all it would be unfair to the gardaí. I am delighted that the Deputy has had the opportunity of correcting it.
If the Deputy has information that would be of help to the Garda—and he was in America at the particular time—then arising from what the Deputy said today I hope that the Garda authorities will see the report of the Dáil debate and that they will do everything to ensure that anybody who is responsible in any way for anything that might have gone wrong does not get away with it. Nobody in this House would want to see him getting away with it. I do not care whether it is a member of the force, someone working in the docks, or whether it is customs officials or anybody.
Deputy Tully asked for the figures in respect of recruitment and wastage from the force for each year from 1970. There is a whole lot of figures here: 1970, 147; 1971, 137; 1972, 125; right up to 1979 when the figure was 112. If the Deputy wishes to have any further breakdown of these figures between the categories mentioned he can get in touch with me and I will let him know the details. Perhaps it would be better if I wrote to Deputy Tully because there are many details involved in the answers. I have only two minutes or so left to speak so I think I should arrange to send it to him.
There were a number of matters raised by Deputy Harte on the Louden Ryan Report. He referred to the test in Irish. The oral Irish test consists of a simple conversation on ordinary topics such as salutations, food and drink, clothes, health, sickness, weather, games and pastimes. It is not a very difficult standard to attain. It is desirable that members of the Garda Síochána should be in a position to deal with any member of the public who might want to conduct some part of his or her business in Irish. It is not a very difficult obstacle to overcome.
With regard to recruiting, of course there was heavy recruiting to the Garda Síochána during the term of office of the Coalition Government. Approximately 1,500 additional young men were brought into the force and there was approximately 1,500 more brought in between 1969-1973, the period of office of Deputy Desmond O'Malley. To date an extra 1,250 during my short time were recruited and there are another 500 on the way. There will be more certainly.
With regard to the Ryan Committee, there was a comment that only the pay part of the Committee's recommendations was implemented and nothing else has happened. That is not so. Discussions are taking place between the Garda Commissioner, the Garda associations and the Department of Justice on a wide range of recommendations.
On parole, it is fair to say that we have by far the most liberal system of any country in the Nine. We have more people out under the supervision of welfare officers than we have in our entire prison system. We can be very proud of that. We are away ahead of many other countries as far as our prisons are concerned and as far as standards in the prisons are concerned. However, that does not mean that there is room for complacency.
I respect what the Minister is saying but I do not believe a word of it.
I want to be honest with the Deputy. I am not claiming credit for this. My predecessor and the Government of which he was a member and his predecessor did a lot and I am continuing it. What I have said is true and there is no reason why I would try to deceive the House. There is no political gain in this for anyone.
We are not talking politics.
No. We are talking about human beings in prison.
And I acknowledge the Minister's concern.
I know that. There is no issue between us.
If the Minister says something, it has to be accepted by the House.
It is like a lucky dip here to see what I should or should not say or the area I should go into. Deputy Noel Browne dealt with the Coolock Community Law Centre. The Community Law Centre at Coolock is a FLAC operation. Officials of my Department have had discussions with FLAC about the future funding of their operations. The FLAC representatives have been informed that when the civil legal aid and advice scheme comes into operation the payment of further grants will be discontinued and that to enable them to dispose of the cases they may have on hands—this was the cause of concern—a guarantee has been given that they would be paid a further and final special grant to enable them to deal with all the cases they have on their hands.
Does the Minister see any prospect of them being kept open at all?
I would like to think that the scheme, which I hope to have in operation on behalf of the Government by the end of the year, will provide free legal aid on a very wide scale for the community as a whole.
To demonstrate a need for it? Even the question of choice might arise.
The Minister should conclude. We are establishing a precedent that is not to be followed.
I should like to thank Members of all parties and those who do not belong to a party, for the contribution they made. I know they hold their views sincerely and I appreciate their interests in the security field as a whole. I acknowledge that they are as concerned, as they should be. I should like to thank the Garda and prison officers for the work that they are doing. I should like to thank the staff of the Department of Justice for the tremendous work that they do also.
Vote put and agreed to.