In debating this last week we touched on many areas. I want to move past the point raised last week to a new area. The announcement last night by the Minister for Justice was pertinent to the matter we discussed here last week. It worries me when I hear that the answer to crime is the establishment of some conference for the law enforcement agencies. On too many occasions we have lost the opportunity to look at crime prevention. I have always taken the view that there is something wrong in a society where we can predict so easily where our prison population might come from.
Last week I criticised the approach of those who would measure the effectiveness of the prison system by the number of inmates detained in it at any one time. Society can be tested in many different ways. We can walk into the nursery of any maternity hospital in this city and look at all the children there. They all look exactly alike, covered by the same colour blanket in the same kind of carry cot, one indefinable and no different from the next except to a mature and discriminatory eye. The sad thing is that a casual look at the home addresses of those children will allow us to predict broadly how those young children will spend their lives, how they will grow up and whether they are likely to be involved in crime.
I often use this argument in talking to those people who would consider themselves to be very much in favour of life and qualify of life, pro-life and other aspects to it. Why is it that if I see the address to be Darndale or deep in the inner city that I know that child has a very strong likelihood of finishing up in prison? Look at it the other way. Why is it if I go to any prison in the country and take the addresses of the inmates that the majority of them would come from certain types of neighbourhoods, certain areas? Is it that these children are born with some sort of innate predetermination towards crime? I do not believe that to be the case. Something happens between the time they leave that nursery and the time they arrive in prison and it is very simple to follow through the train of thought.
Some of those children will leave hospital and they will go to homes that are warm and clean and spacious. Others will go to homes which are overcrowded, cold, dirty, badly equipped, and immediately the difference begins. Over the course of the next two or three years some of those children will learn to play with sand in the utility room or they will go on holidays or Sunday drives, trips abroad; they will have a wealth of experience which any child should have. Others may not be allowed out to the balcony in case they fall down from the fourth storey. They never get out, they never get to see beyond their own neighbourhood. Their parents cannot offer them the luxuries or the alternatives of pre-school or the local Montessori school, and they eventually arrive at their primary school.
Some of those children will arrive at a primary school which is well heated, well lit, well equipped, painted regularly, in a neighbourhood where they are safe. Others will go to a primary school in a deprived neighbourhood, where the board of management do not have enough money to keep the school in operation, where the teachers are at their wits' end trying to hold the school together, and these children are already at a disadvantage compared to those who have come from a better off background because we have never helped them in between. Their readiness to learn is impaired; their readiness to participate in the system is impaired. They will go through the system. They will go right through the primary school and every year the lack of privilege, the disadvantage, will be reinforced, consolidated by further deprivation, further cutbacks. I am not pointing the finger at any particular Government or any particular system in dealing with this point, but the reality is that is what happens. They go through the primary system and by the time they come to change to the post primary school there will be a yawning gap between the haves and the have-nots in society.
They will learn indiscipline through the world around them. Schools, even at the best of times, can barely compensate. The only time we really put money into these people is when they arrive at the courts and when they arrive at prison. We have the whole thing cockeyed. I ask the Minister of State to bring this back to the Minister.
Last week I was careful to say some positive things about this debate but the reality is that I am meeting a delegation of teachers tomorrow morning from a part of the north Clondalkin area of this city where they just cannot cope. Would it surprise you, a Leas-Chathaoirligh, to know that on two occasions in the past month principals of primary schools rang up my office with an unusual query: to ask me what they do in a situation when they have fifth and sixth class children driving to school in their own cars. I know of another school in the same area where yesterday week they took three burntout cars from the school playground. These are primary schools, where the average age of the children is in the low teens. Can anyone imagine what that area will be like in five or six or seven years time when these youngsters really find their feet? A huge number of those kids will finish up in prison. In years to come we will be debating the subject of crime and the figures in those areas will be high.
I said last week that I am sick and tired of craw-thumping pieties every time there is a prison suicide. Do we now look forward to a situation where we will sack the principal if there is a school suicide or blame the parents if there is a suicide at home? The motion before us is far too facile. It is an insult to the intelligence. It is the role of the Opposition to take the Government to task and they are right to do so. The Government have to take responsibility because they are in control and have to carry the can, but they cannot be held wholly to blame. We should see a balance of proposals. Enough is not being done by the Government but the answer is not to build more prisons or to fill existing prisons. The answer is to prevent crime before it begins through serious investment in the elimination of under privilege in an attempt to wipe out disadvantage and to compensate for the difference between the privileged and the under privileged by investing in education, particularly primary education. This is the only area where not only can we compensate for under privilege but we can also break the vicious cycle of under privilege which leads to crime and imprisonment. We should be talking about prevention, not enforcement.