Deputy Vincent Brady is in possession.
Supplementary Estimates, 1981. - Vote 23: Office of the Minister for Justice (Resumed).
Debate resumed on the following motion:
That a supplementary sum not exceeding £1,215,000 be granted to defray the charge which will come in course of payment during the year ending on the 31st day of December, 1981 for the salaries and expenses of the Office of the Minister for Justice, and of certain other services administered by that Office, and of the Public Record Office, and of the Keeper of State Papers and for the purchase of historical documents, etc., and for payment of a grant-in-aid.
—(Minister for Justice).
Before moving the adjournment of this debate, I had covered various aspects relating to the serious increase in crime in our cities, particularly Dublin city, and the growing and wanton destruction of property, vandalism and all these areas in which crime unfortunately has been increasing over the past number of years. It would be well to reflect also that during the past ten years the value of property stolen has increased by 1,200 per cent— a considerable increase even allowing for the rate of inflation during those years. In 1970 the value of stolen property amounted to £1¼ million as against £14½ million in 1980. All Members will agree that this situation certainly requires immediate and urgent attention. I am not overlooking the excellent work of the Department of Justice and the Garda in recent years, but an additional urgent effort must now be made.
This brings us back to the numerical strength of the Garda and the assurances which they must receive from the Minister that he will continue the commitment given to them by the Department and the former Minister for Justice in relation to strengthening the number of the Garda force by about 2,000 over a period.
I have already dealt in some detail with the drug problem and with drug pushers. Allowing for charity, most people will recognise that drug pushers can be described as worse than murderers, because they destroy and murder young lives and family life all around them. I sincerely hope that the Minister will urge the officials concerned to put every means at the disposal of the Garda, and particularly the Drug Squad, to strengthen their efforts in their battle against this hideous crime. Nobody in this House would argue with that description.
I again pay tribute to the Garda for their tremendous work over the years and urge that every support be given to their efforts. In this respect it is rather unfortunate that on the Minister's appointment, the morale of the Garda may have been damaged by the appointment of a former Commissioner to advise the Minister on Garda activity. I make this point rather carefully. We should all be aware of the beneficial effect to the community over the years of our very fair-minded Garda force. They should be supported as the upholders of law and order.
I welcome the opportunity of speaking on the Vote to give further moneys to works which emanate from the Office of the Minister for Justice. What I have to say refers to that section of the additional sums being voted for the management and control of prisons. My remarks are influenced as much by the speeches I have heard, which have been very concerned ones, as by the fact that for nearly 14 years I have been interested in research and teaching in the area of deviants in our lower society. That is an appropriate point at which to begin. As I listened to the speeches and read reports from the Department of Justice in different administrations, I have been struck by the paucity of resources allocated to research. This is reflected in the approaches and opinions which we hold concerning crime and criminality. Probably there is no other area which would have yielded as quickly positive results of a social policy kind, had we had the forward thinking and the commitment to try to understand the behaviour which is deviant behaviour and that portion of it which ends up as the crime of our society.
In this Supplementary Estimate there is no figure which will enable any serious contribution to be made to this omission. It is interesting that people are willing to address themselves in their concerned and well meant speeches to the problem of the reactions to crime but they are not, of themselves, addressed to the nature of crime or to finding out how crime comes to manifest itself in our society. This is a very serious omission. What these people are speaking about are, in fact, bits and pieces and they are ignoring the source of the problem.
For example, with the limited resources to do all that the previous Deputies have spoken about, is it not of concern to us that we spend a great deal of these scarce resources in the pursuit of petty crime? We make decisions that we will concentrate on the pursuit of petty offenders for the most part. I want to have a certain logical structure to what I have to say in this regard. In the different reports which have emanated throughout the years I question the utility of the figures presented to us as a true indication of the crime rate. No self-respecting sociologist in the area of criminal behaviour, or criminologist, or lawyer interested in the criminological background of legal offences would be willing to accept that these figures are anything but a very crude indicator of what is happening in society. These do not include, for example, great corporate crimes which visit immense misery on people. It is disturbing to look at the annual report to the Minister for Justice of the commissioner and see those who might take vast sums out of a company, forcing that company into liquidation, thereby, if the stamps have not been paid, visiting immense misery on people who will have to drag their way to seek the means to live. Corporate crime is not represented very accurately and indeed it is not a concern of people who speak about crime in our society.
There are other forms of such crime which are not represented either. Those are the crimes which have a low visibility on society. We find represented and, in fact, over-emphasised, the regular crimes of people from deprived backgrounds, people who are involved again and again with the law. There is an immense responsibility to be carried by the responsible sections of the media who have run a campaign to suggest that there is almost a natural relationship between low income and crime. People who live in deprived circumstances in the Dublin area have regularly to put up with badly researched, inaccurate and offensive allegations against working class areas and low income areas about the crime rate.
Let me place on the record of the House that there is not a bit of evidence to suggest that there is a neat relationship between urban living and crime. Researchers have issued publications in the last few years showing the expansion of criminality into the rural areas but yet the analysis suggests that Dublin is, of its nature, a place that is naturally impelled towards crime and that the rural areas are somewhat immune from crime. This is an example of the distance between scholarship and policy in this area. I find it appalling in 1981 that we have, as a substitute for consideration about crime, its causes and its effects, a series of whimiscal bits and pieces of prejudice patched together and not only an omission in relation to substantial research but I might say, as somebody who has sought permission to conduct research from the Department of Justice and from Deputy Collins when he was Minister for Justice, no co-operation. I have had the spectacle of my research students being told they could not visit the prisons or prisoners. As the longest teaching and practising research sociologist in crime in this island I have had nothing but hostility in relation to my approaches for co-operation in relation to research.
I got the impression over the years that it is not only that we want to blind ourselves in relation to what is happening in the area of research in relation to criminology but that we want to obstruct research. The popular version of this is to suggest that people like myself who are interested in the nature of the prison system, alternatives to prison or moving towards more humane alternatives to prison are somehow soft on crime and soft on criminals and we represent some liberal tradition which must somehow or other be slapped down or it will pose a threat to the structure of an otherwise safe society.
Our present approach can be summarised in a sentence. It is rather as if we had decided to concentrate the whole thrust of our energies into trying to understand the nature of fire extinguishers and not trying to understand the nature of fire. That is a summary of what we have produced from different versions of the Department of Justice and different Ministers in this area. It has no regard to the general point of the omission of a commitment to research into the social policy areas about attitudes towards crime and justice. There is the annual report I have referred to of the Commissioner of the Garda to the Minister, a well-meant document but practically useless for research purposes, enabling us to answer questions about the total volume of property stolen and recovered but not able to tell us anything about the incidence of crime by district, county, social class or sex, or to give any useful information we might need to make a proper policy decision. Over the years the format of the report remains the same.
I want to make a positive suggestion about this. The Minister of State should address himself as a matter of urgency to changing the nature of the presentation of the report and perhaps prepare a methodological appendix to the report indicating the source of the figures and how they have been arrived at so that students in this area can go on to make some suggestions about future research because we have not even begun yet. There is another caveat I want to enter in relation to the question of crime. In those Estimates people frequently speak about the spending of money towards the containment of crime but society often finds itself involved in a tautology when it comes to the incidence of crime. Society finds crime where it looks for it. If you do not dispose of your resources in different parts of society you will find, lo and behold, a low conviction rate, whereas, if you concentrate your resources on low income areas, on areas where you believe, by a myth you manage to carry with you in relation to locations of crime, that the crime rate is high you will find that it is so. It is time we got behind those crude assumptions so that we might evolve a policy and can spend our scarce resources in a more accurate, fruitful and rewarding way.
My criticisms in relation to the Department of Justice are of the institutions of the Department rather than of the people in the Department. If I have had obstruction in research I have had individual relationships with members from time to time whom I have met at seminars over the years and I have found them to be understanding and humane people. They have an immense task because they are not handed the resources with which they might do many of the things I am referring to but they find themselves performing within a range of prejudices in society without having the resources or the opportunities to look at the alternatives which are now being practised in other more considerate, more humane societies.
In the Vote we have today about the additional money to help run the prisons the Minister for Justice is looking for money to handle the consequences of failure in relation to expenditure in social welfare and health. When we look at the background of the people who are in prisons we find again and again that they are people from deprived backgrounds, people who had no opportunity in life and whose parents have not had the experience of full-time employment for a great number of years. When neither parent works for two or three years, when recreational facilities and employment opportunities are very few, those people having the benefit of a bad address they know that the police will be regularly around looking for information, and on that vigilance on behalf of the property committed society these people are supposed suddenly to develop a value system that will lift them out of all this and make them as good as anyone of the property-orientated middle class.
We have tried to control such areas in the interests of people who do not care about justice but who care about property and we have not sufficiently tried to understand the nature of those areas in terms of the opportunities that are available to the young children and the blighted social existence forced on their parents. Is it any wonder then that the concentration of our concern is about money and spending more? Are we going to get more? If one went on like that to extend it to its logical conclusion one would have a vast police force and one would never ask a question about the structure of the society to which one was addressing one's concern or vigilance.
I mentioned one summary statement earlier. If there is another one that can be made at this stage about the Irish approach towards justice it is that we have been interested in controlling our society, rather than understanding it, and in controlling it in the interests of prevailing values of property. We have omitted to try to understand it in terms of the life prospects of the people who are in trouble in our society. The result is clear in the prison statistics.
By and large people in Ireland do not go to prison: By and large in Ireland very few people commit acts of violence. They are not in prison for that. They are involved in crimes against property. How absurd in the month of November 1981 to be addressing ourselves to whether we are spending enough money on managing the prisons, and ignoring the question as to why unfortunate people are pushed into involvement in crimes against property, ignoring the questions of scarcity and deprivation.
I must say frankly that I was appalled at the reaction of Deputy Collins and the people who advised him to the published report of a commission on which I sat, the Commission of Inquiry into the Irish Prison System in 1980. The people who sat on that Commission were asked to investigate the Irish penal system and to come up with suggestions on the basis of information which might be available to us either in submissions or our own research training. We were described as a self-appointed committee. That is the co-operation we got.
We were refused co-operation. Repeated letters from the chairman, Dr. Sean McBride, met an obdurate refusal of co-operation. We pressed ahead. We paid our own expenses for the 51 meetings we held. We paid our own money to publish the report which contains a number of suggestions. I urge the Minister of State to take that report and use some of the positive proposals, and not do the cheap thing his predecessor did on this matter, which was to take a figure we had included for prison services for education and say the one figure we had wrong within the report absolved them from considering the general principles in the report. There was the little seedy suggestion: "They got a figure about education wrong. They cannot be trusted." The entire report was thrown out on the basis of a quibble about a figure. These were voluntary people, scholars, doing a job in the interest of society and they were regarded with contumely by people who should care about reforming the penal system.
That is our record. When everybody has stopped congratulating everybody else this afternoon, it is time to face up to some positive suggestions about the prison system and how we are spending money within it. I have been saying that we have the record of obdurate refusal to seek to understand the social setting in which people find themselves who will be later represented in the crime rate. Of course behaviour which is criminal reflects something about our society. I listened to the concerned, passionate pleas from people interested in drug abuse among our young population. People are very sincere about that. How can you divorce the question of drug abuse from the fatalistic tendency of our culture and society and our general commitment to escapism reflected in the expenditure level for alcohol and cigarettes?
People are evasive in their response to society and look for the first drug that is available. That kind of social expenditure is linked to the drugs question. It is not that the drug question is something like the 'flu and you can discover a vaccine and start dishing it out and it will suddenly stop. The abuse of drugs is a social phenomenon which exists in society in circumstances which can be understood. We are ill-equipped to understand it with our consistency in the matter of ignoring research and concentrating on tactical responses: have we enough people on the streets? Have we enough people doing this, that and the other?
Of course we need to give more money to the Drug Squad. I agree with that in many ways, but that is not the end of the matter. Our approach is to suggest that there are people who consume drugs and then there are the moral community who do not. The moral community are a drug-prone community spending the highest proporation of their income in Europe on trying to get rid of the fact that it is a society with people filling themselves with alcohol and tobacco in proportion to their income. This community is setting itself up to judge people who are using other forms of drugs.
I would urge the House to be cautious about accepting the glib statements being made to try to suggest that one kind of drug is the same as another. People who sell heroin, for example, are commiting a most incredible, monstrous crime against people who might be potential addicts. As every sane person knows, there is a difference between the attitude adopted to cannabis and that adopted to heroin. I cannot develop this point very much more, because we would have a short-term cheap construction of my remarks that somehow or another I was in favour of one thing and not of the other.
I am in favour of an understanding of the social setting in which drug consumption takes place. I suppose I have an advantage. About 16 years ago I worked in the same department with Professor Lindesmith of the United States when he was looking at the question of the drug problem in the United States society.
Some of his work later was to develop a social response to it. In Ireland there is ignorance on these questions and a commitment to stop research and not to conduct research. I am making a plea for money to be provided in this Estimate for research in this area so that we can know more about the people about whom we are pontificating moralistically in a property ridden society.
The Deputy will appreciate that we should be discussing what is in the Estimate rather than what is not in it.
My assumption was that the presence of some things in the Estimate precluded the presence of other things, and that one thing had driven the other thing out. Perhaps that was idealistic of me. I will turn to what is in the Estimate. I should like to talk about the probation and welfare service under subhead G for which we are voting money. You cannot discuss the adequacy of the probation and welfare service and the appropriate expenditure without understanding the prison population towards which that expenditure is addressed.
The former Minister, Deputy Collins, in a speech in which he congratulated his successor, Deputy Mitchell, referred more than once to lobbies which had developed and would develop in relation to the provision of additional expenditure on prisons, or the provision of a new prison. I count myself among those who are unequivocally of the opinion that to spend money in this decade on the provision of further prison facilities for women is insanity. It is part of a general rejection of findings from all over Europe and the United States. Prison is limited in what it achieves. If you were to say, for example, that its purpose was to punish you might argue that prison has been successful. If you were to say its purpose was to rehabilitate, the evidence from every society is that it is costing millions and is an expensive failure.
I welcomed before now, and I do so again, the publication of the White Paper Community Service Orders which began a discussion on alternatives to prisons. This was a step in the right direction. On the question of the money which might be spent to administer prisons in which women may find themselves, I want to say that women are a very tiny proportion of the prison population. People are not usually aware of the fact that there was a tremendous decline in the rate of conviction applicable to women between the twenties and now. In 1979 women represented 6.7 per cent of the criminal population despite being 50 per cent of the population. For that 6.7 per cent it is suggested that we proceed with the building of a new prison for women. Let us look at the 6.7 per cent. For what crimes were women sent to prison? In the year 1979 to which I referred 26 women went to prison for drunkenness, 57 for larceny, six for soliciting and two for begging. Thirty-one women were convicted of offences involving violence such as assault or malicious damage to prison. In 1978, of the 137 women sent to prison the daily average in Mountjoy was 15 and in Limerick prison it was nine.
If there are such small numbers of women involved in crime, why waste resources in a custodial measure which the whole of Europe is saying is limited in terms of its efficacy generally and rehabilitation and which in the case of women is so wasteful in relation to what it can achieve? The crimes I mentioned, drunkenness, vagrancy, prostitution are all socially derived crimes and intervention in the area of social welfare or in better economic provision would eliminate the need for such crimes. Of course there is always less than half a dozen people — never more — who need secure custodial care. I want to dispose of another criticism usually offered against people who represent views as I do. It is that if one is against the expenditure of considerable resources for, say, prison buildings one is somehow or other contributing to the bad conditions in which prisoners now find themselves. Everyone wants to improve the physical setting of people who are deprived of their freedom for one reason or another.
There are practical measures which I ask the Minister of State to urge on the Minister for Justice that relate to some of the points raised in the debate. I will make one practical suggestion. Why not arrange for the Department of Justice to invite the universities to co-operate with them in the establishment of an institute of criminology? We all know of the considerable sums that are necessary for attendance at conferences and so on. Why not have an entirely new generous era of co-operation between the Department of Justice and those of us who are involved in research on crime and delinquency?
I do not want to give the impression that everything is negative. I have said already that there are people who produced proposals which I welcomes on the document dealing with community service orders. They are part of an approach towards alternatives to prison. Unfortunately the Department of Justice have to deal with people who are consequences of failed economic policies and of failure to intervene at the level of social welfare and health. They are operating in an atmosphere in which people are concerned about custodial solutions rather than alternatives. In many ways it is not the prisoners we need to educate, it is the population.
In a country such as Holland people realise how offensive it is in very deprived areas to drive large cars through such areas as an example of ostentatious wealth. Unattended property may also be an example of such ostentatious wealth, and we wonder why people who have been deprived of everything in life commit crimes of theft. That attitude in some European countries is to decriminalise certain crimes: in other words, people are asked to behave responsibly in the way they brandish their portable property in the face of the deprived. That is something we might look at. Why waste resources in going after the youngster who breaks into a car? We bring him before a process, that was described accurately by Deputy Mervyn Taylor, that clearly and carefully establishes an identity of criminality. The person who has been before the courts will tell one of the merits and demerits of the various justices. He will know how to commit crime again. At that point society is well on the way to schooling the next generation of criminals and their crimes establish the morality of the property majority in society. Then, we can have further debates here about the efficacy of the resources to protect our property from the people who represent a threat.
Deputy Collins, in urging the Minister to press ahead with new buildings, was revealing a dreadful misunderstanding of the nature of crime in our society. I have been urging the Minister to forge a new understanding of the nature of crime. It is not buildings we need. It is a better mind towards the incidence of crime and the background to that crime.
There is also the question of the efficacy of expenditure in relation to other matters that are non-custodial, for example, the treatment of people outside prisons. I wonder when the Dáil and the Seanad were concerned about the way in which the prisons function and the aims of the prisons? During the years I have read reports of Dáil debates on the matter of crime I have never heard anybody make a case, for example, that the aim was to rehabilitate exclusively, or that it was to punish exclusively. Governments of the day received excellent proposals from people who worked in prisons but they failed to implement them.
There are those who operate on the tacit philosophy that the purpose of the prison system is to punish. It is time we had a explicit statement that this is not so. If the aim is to rehabilitate, I urge the Minister to seek the resources for adequate rehabilitation, for adequate vocational and educational training within the system and for the linked community schemes. There should be an attempt to understand the dilemma of the prison population. For example, do we think that people who were in prison for years were helped by being released from prison at a weekend, perhaps when there was a bank holiday, only to find every social agency closed, with no place to go to get assistance? Those people could stay out for four days but they had no place to go. Then we were surprised that people who had been in prison originally for stealing were driven to stealing once again. There is also the situation where people on leaving prison went to one employer after another only to find that when their recent address was made known they were not wanted.
Of course, now there are good services, and I commend the people who began this consultation with prisoners about employment, prospects before their release from prison. However, it is not enough. There was a concern in the trade union movement in the forties and the fifties that needs to be strengthened now. The trade unions have an important contribution to make here in seeking to help rehabilitate people whose employment prospects are diminished following their release from prison. Our attitude should be a caring one.
There are other procedures we should use before a person gets to prison. When young people are detained is it not more useful—something that does not happen—to remove them to some kind of hostel where they can have directed towards them assessment, counselling and help rather than to leave them in a Garda station overnight? Is it better to create the image of prison containment in the minds of young people rather than offering them some kind of concern? Lest I be accused in the usual reply to statements like those I am making, of being soft on violence, the violence I am addressing myself tois an institutional violence, an uncaring society that perpetrates the violence of not seeking to understand the deprivation that produces the crime rate, the violence of institutional structures that seek to punish rather than rehabilitate, the violence of a hypocrisy that seeks to protect property at any cost and takes glib examples of threats to property as a substitute for analysis, the violence of the newspapers which castigate the deprived from poorer areas and fail to seek understanding.
I endorse the many useful suggestions made in this debate. I urge the Minister to put an end to the absurdity constituted by the Curragh prison, the only prison in Europe administered by military personnel. The report of the visiting committee in 1977 said when discussing the Curragh military unit that there was a requirement for workshops or some facilities, and a lack of facilities for the rehabilitative training of prisoners in military custody. The committee were aware that in a prison with a population of between 22 and 27 prisoners the provision of such facilities might be disproportionately costly and not get full usage. The visiting committee were to be frustreated in most of their suggestions.
On the question of expenditure, might I direct a question to the Minister? Is he satisfied that the visiting committee structure will provide him with suggestions for improving prison conditions? I suspect it is deficient for a number of reasons. The well-meaning people who find themselves on these committees feel they are involved in a tokenism and have often been frustrated by what they felt was their inability to seriously influence things.
On the question of prison services, I welcome any expenditure that can improve the lot of those in prison or those who have to look after prisoners.
On the question of salaries, every criticism I have made so far has been of social attitudes in relation to crime and prison. If the justice system has to deal with the neglect in the economic, social and health area, equally the people who run the prisons find themselves operating with inadequate resources. If the Minister says he is going to move qualitatively away from a philosophy of containment and punishment to one of rehabilitation and care, he will have to give the resources often asked for by different prison officers' associations. They need the opportunity for training and preparing themselves to deal with people in great difficulties. Because of an insufficiency of numbers the best intentions of these people can be frustrated. The Minister should make provisions for that.
The point that keeps occurring to me is the manner in which we discuss expenditure for the Department of Justice in a society that is completely committed to a backward view of crime. We were in favour of crime historically when it meant we could get property. We nodded and winked at a rural criminality that often perpetrated violence against people and animals in the cruellest sense. Today, when we are faced with the petty crime of the city areas, our attitude is the opposite—to turn on defenceless youngsters, and impoverished families from the neglected areas. If we offered compassion for rural violence historically we now have the opposite attitude to crime in the urban areas. Our attitude towards urban crime betrays ignorance, with people learning their social philosophy from the Evening Herald rather than from any serious attempt to try to understand the nature of the distribution of crime in our society.
I said prisons in terms of their efficacy were limited in what they could do in the area of rehabilitation. This was borne out in the Canadian report, all the European reports, the Scandinavian report and two years ago by an interparliamentary report in Britain. I ask the Minister to take the community service order as a small beginning in his approach to developing alternatives to prison. The Minister has in his Department, even though it arrived uninvited, the report of the commission into the penal inquiry system on which I sat. I place on record my apology to officials who detected an inaccuracy in it in relation to total sums for education.
I ask the officials to urge on the new incumbent of the office of Minister for Justice a more generous response that an inaccuracy should not be sufficient to dismiss the report altogether. That report contains valuable suggestions for restructuring the Department of Justice and the prison system. It made suggestions about the treatment of offenders and the setting up of a treatment of offenders board to look into the whole question of rehabilitation, custodial care and prevention. One unit of expenditure on intervention saves us from waste of resources in building vast custodial places which serve no great purpose.
I want to promise the Minister co-operation on this, as somebody who works in an academic institution. If we are invited we will respond and help him to develop all his other custodial services by committing ourselves personally and institutionally to the conduct of research. For far too long and at too high a price a gap has grown between the modern findings of research in the area of crime and actual policy response.
I recommend that we be imaginative, particularly in the area of the young people who find themselves in difficulty with the law. It is fascinating that, quietly and unobtrusively, many gardaí in their middle and older years are acting as unofficial councillors to young people in difficulties. We need to formalise that.
Let us take the one official source of figures we have: the annual report of the Garda Commissioner to the Minister for Justice. He tells us how much property has been stolen and how much has been recovered, how many crimes have been perpetrated and how many proceedings have been initiated and proceeded with. That simple research statement gives it all away; we are a society concerned about our property and less concerned about the life prospects of our society. If we balance the logical equation that comes from that it is that the population is in difficulty and our property at risk. It is high time we addressed ourselves to the anti-social attitudes based on a property philosophy which provoke incredible difficulties in lower income areas. We should look at the whole gamut of our response and expenditure in the area of justice to try to redress the balance in favour of the deprived and their children.
I understand Deputy Barrett has co-operated with the Whilps in forfeiting some of his time so that the Minister will have at least ten minutes in which to reply.
(Dublin North-West): I congratulate the Minister and Minister of State on their appointment to what is a difficult Ministry and wish them well in their efforts there. Crime and vandalism are something every part of the country is subjected to at present. Private and public property, even schools and churches, are vandalised. The number of cars stolen and burned in the Dublin area is increasing every week. The number of robberies, especially those with violence, have increased. In his speech Deputy Collins said that 85 bank robberies took place in the last three months. Out of that number 70 were in the city of Dublin. Old people have been beaten up and robbed and this year a priest on his way to say Mass was murdered.
In my constituency I am informed that people who are concerned about vandalism of churches and schools have formed vigilante groups. These people do not get any pleasure from doing this work but because of the serious understrength of the Garda in the area they have no option. In the Ballymun Garda station they operate a four-shift system. There are only two sergeants and four gardaí on any of these shifts. On days when some of them have to attend court the station sergeant has to operate the station on his own and deal with phone calls and attend to people who call to the desk. I am also informed that the garda who was allocated to look after the school attendance duties had to be withdrawn because of the shortage of staff. At any given time there is only one garda available to do patrol duty in an area which takes in the whole flat complex, the new housing schemes of Poppintree, Santry Avenue and part of the Glasnevin area. Since the Garda station was opened in Ballymun some years ago this whole area, due to the housing developments at Poppintree and Santry Avenue, has increased threefold, yet the number of gardaí employed at the station has decreased. There is great credit due to the Garda for the services they provide in the area in view of the serious strains they are subjected to because of insufficient staff.
The previous Minister for Justice, Deputy Collins, was very aware of the need to strengthen the number of gardaí in the Dublin area and gave a commitment to recruit 1,000 extra gardaí to be trained for areas in Dublin where they were understaffed and where crime was on the increase. As the Minister said in his statement:
.... the Government have decided to recruit 300 new gardaí—the maximum number possible that the Templemore Training Center can cope with—as soon as possible after the Civil Service Commissioners provide me with their complete list of successful applicants. This list is now expected in January next and actual training is expected to commence in February.
When will they be available to do duty on the streets? It will be at least next May or June. The setting up of the Special Task Force was a special tribute to Deputy Collins. Deputy Collins gave no credit to himself but to the officers operating the force. In the early part of this year there was a decrease in the number of bank robberies.
There is doubt in the minds of people who are concerned about crime whether the present Government are concerned when only 300 extra gardaí are to be recruited. I am informed that the adviser to the Department is the former commissioner. We can look back to the time when he was commissioner, to the one-man squad cars. When requests were made to gardaí to go to the scene of a crime the reply was that they had squad cars and motor bikes parked outside the stations but no one to operate them. The recent announcement by the Minister of State at the Department of Social Welfare that it is the intention of the Government to close Loughan House have com-how little they know about crime. Young criminals in Laughan House have committed serious crimes. Otherwise they would not be there. They are now to be let loose or transferred to what can be described as a first-class luxury hotel.
Deputy Higgins spoke about what they do in European countries. We are concerned with what should be done here. Many of these criminals do not come from deprived areas. Many of them come from well-to-do areas. When they are released from Loughan House the Government should have some schemes whereby these offenders could be made work in areas destroyed by vandals. Some of the existing law in regard to crime and vandalism is over 100 years old. When the Garda apprehend criminals and bring them before the courts the criminals are very often let off or put on probation and many of them go on committing crimes.
There are, I suppose, many reasons why young people become involved in crime. One may be the lack of sufficient recreational facilities. Today young people are better fed. They have more leisure time. They have more energy compared with their counterparts of 20 or 30 years ago. Today there are no chores or duties assigned to boys and girls when they come home from school and they need something to help them get rid of their energy. Recreational facilities would help them to get rid of their energy and, if there are no such facilities, they will resort to vandalism. Those of us who travelled with Dublin Corporation to Belfast last year saw the recreational facilities available to young people there.
Another cause of vandalism is the availability of alcohol to young people. They can buy drink in off-licence premises and supermarkets. Provided drink is not in a corked receptable and is not consumed on the premises they are not dreatking the law. In most cases the management and staff of off-licence premises and supermarkets feel very strongly about selling drink to young people, but they have no option. If they refuse they are subjected to abuse. My colleague, Deputy Seán Doherty, when he was Minister of State in the Department of Justice was preparing legislation designed to correct the present unhappy situation. I trust this Government will not delay in updating legislation in relation to teenage drinking.
One problem which contributes to the existing situation is the ease with which extensions are obtained. To these extensions can be attributed the increasing number of fatal and serious accidents on our roads. It was established in a survey carried out by Jervis Street Hospital some time age that the majority of those involved in road accidents had a far higher level of alcohol in their blood than that permitted by law. It was also established that the majority of serious accidents take place in the early hours of the morning after the pubs close.
The increase in drug-taking by young people is a problem to which many Deputies have referred. There has been an increase of six in the Drug Squad recently. The Minister should consider seriously further increasing the number. There should be no penny-pinching and no cutbacks. Crime and vandalism will have to be curbed and any money spent to achieve that object will be money well spent.
First of all, I thank those Deputies who contributed to the debate and I apologise for not being here during the entire debate—I was here for the greater part of it—but my absence was due to the fact that another debate in the other House also affected my Department.
Deputy Barrett, to take the last speaker first, seemed to suggest there was some type of ex-commissioner advising my Department. I do not know how he reached that conclusion. There is no ex-commissioner advising my Department in any capacity. He mentioned that only 300 were being recruited to the Garda Síochána. The fact that there is no recruitment at the moment cannot possibly be a criticism of my Department. It can only be a criticism of the previous Government. The chronology is that recruitment did not start until May-June of this year when advertisements were placed. There were over 6,000 applicants. More than half of those were exempt from the entrance examination because they held the requisite standard in the leaving certificate. About half of those who sat for the examination got it which means that well over 4,000 have to be interviewed. Because of the number of successful applicants the interviewing process is taking longer than expected.
The former Minister said he was given to understand these interviews would be completed towards the end of October or early November and that was the information given to me when I became Minister. Unfortunately the interviewing process is taking much longer than excepted. This is a matter completely outside my control because the Civil Service Commissioners are absolutely independent in the discharge of their functions. I understand the earliest the list can be concluded is January and recruitment will commence in February. It would be quite unfair to start recruiting from a partial list because we would be filling vacancies with people who might not necessarily be at the top of the list at all and so we have to wait until the list is completed. If there is any criticism then it is a criticism of the Deputy's own party for not proceeding with recruitment much earlier, the more so as this sort of delay could reasonably have been envisaged.
Deputy Barrett said we are recruiting only 300. That is not so. We are recruiting 300 immediately. That is the maximum number that can be catered for in Templemore. That is not to say that when their training is complete, there will be no further recruits in training. Of course, there will. I said we will not recruit until the list is complete. I have agreed that one class of recruits, numbering 25, will be recruited from the middle of this month and that they will being training within the next couple of weeks. I have done this because of there being a spare capacity in Templemore. The 25 will consist of applicants from the last list who had not been recruited and none from the new list, which is not yet complete.
In order that the House will have the precise numbers in respect of applications I have with me a note which shows that this year the number of applications received was 6,521, that of these, 2,663, were exempt from the entrance examination. The number of applicants who sat for the examination was 3,849. That examination was held on 30 July and there were 1,568 successful candidates. This leaves 4,231 candidates to be interviewed but I am sure Deputies will appreciate the length of time that this process will take having regard to the sheer physical exercise involved.
I appreciate very much the good wishes extended both to the Minister of State and to myself by those Deputies who have contributed to the debate. I am greatful in particular for the offer of help from the former Minister. Having been in charge of this Department for four-and-a-half years, Deputy Collins is well aware of the onerous task that is involved. I shall endeavour to answer the various points raised in as much details as possible.
I should like to join with Deputy Collins in paying tribute to the staff of the Department. Compared with other Departments the headquarters staff is quite small but when we include all the personnel of the Department, Garda, members of the prison service and so on, we are talking of about 16,000 people. We are fortunate in having such an efficient, concerned and forward-looking staff in the Department. Not only are they concerned about the welfare of the people generally for whom I have responsibility but they are concerned also for the welfare of prisoners. That is a message that should be understood generally by Deputies.
In general Deputy Collin's speech was gracious and helpful but he was fit to take me to task for what he considered to be a political point. He said that the Department of Justice was not an area in which we should engage in politics. It was not my intention to make a political point but it would be unforgivable of me if, on coming into the House to seek approval for a very substantial Supplementary Estimate, I failed to say what led to the necessity for the different components of this Estimate. I referred to the fact that in the Estimate for Garda pay alone there was a shortfall of the order of £4.3 million. There were shortfalls in respect of other areas also. It was known in January that another £4.3 million would be needed to pay the Garda having regard to the basic rates which applied then. That was not an error of judgment. The files in the Department show clearly the process that was engaged in. A shortage of money was arranged deliberately. On December 22 last there was a Government decision to cut the Garda Estimate by 5 per cent. On foot of ministerial directions there were further cuts in the Garda Vote on 13 and 14 January. The first direction was to cut the Vote by £6.608 million while in the second instance the cut was in the amount of £2.43 million. The net effect of those cuts was that no new posts were created and there was a shortfall of £4.36 million in the provision for the basic pay of the serving strength. I note that in his speech Deputy Collins did not go into detail in this regard though when I was referring to the matter he interrupted me to say that I was indulging in rubbish. I repeat that the story I gave is the true story and I am willing to have an independent assessment of the files in my Department to prove what I am saying.
These cutbacks occurred at a time when it was announced that 2,000 extra gardaí would be recruited. That sounded fine but subsequently it was announced that 1,000 gardaí would be recruited. That was open to the interpretation of being a further 1,000 but on examination it transpired that it meant 1,000 of the 2,000 announced originally. What was not conveyed was the news that the recruitment would take a long time and that to increase the strength of the Garda by 1,000 takes about three years. This is because the greatest number that can be trained in any six months is 300. Allowing for natural wastage of 150, the biggest increase in any one year is therefore 450. That represents 900 in two years so that in order to recruit 1,000 we are talking in terms of going into the third year. Therefore, the statement made by the last Government about recruitment was wrong and misleading.
Deputy Collins accused me of trying to convey the impression that the £31 million being asked for in this instance is due entirely to decisions made by him. I did not at any stage try to convey any such impression.
Deputy Collins asked for the cost of the H-Block matches and so on. The estimated cost over and above the normal policing by the Garda Commissioner was £3.5 million for the current year for the policing of the H-Block marches. It is a huge sum. If we had not had to spend that significant sum look at the things that we could do with it. Think of the number of jobs we could create and the improvements we could bring about in some of our prisons about which some people have complained. It is a very large sum to be spent on just one set of marches at a time of deep financial crisis. I take this opportunity to appeal to the people who have engaged in these marches—which, I am thankful, appear to be over—and to people who might think in terms of organising protest marches of this kind to reflect on the cost of those marches to the State and the damage they are doing to the economy in diverting scarce resources from areas of priority where they should be spent, such as job creation.
I was greatly impresed by Deputy Collin's Comments on the drug situation. As I said earlier, I did not get into a very wide-ranging speech on this because I had been advised that I was required to stick to the matters raised in the Supplementary Estimate. However, some Opposition Deputies have taken up this point. Deputy Brady was critical of me because there were only 25 members of the Drug Squad in Dublin. I tell him that his criticism is misdirected. Since I came to office the Drug Squad have been increased very significantly. Also, Deputy Brady seems to be blissfully unaware that his party colleague was Minister for Justice up to only four months ago. Having said that, there is no doubt that the drug situation in this country is now of alarming proportions. I am satisfied that it is at the base of many serious crimes. It is at the base of widespread human misery and that misery is not confined merely to the drug addicts but spreads to their families, parents, wives, husbands, children and friends. The explosion in Drug-taking is one of the most awful developments in our society for many a generation. This affects my Department only to the extent that my Department are responsible for crime prevention and crime detection. The Misuse of Drugs Act which regulates the drug situation is a matter for the Minister for Health. I am happy to tell the House that very soon after taking office I had a very lengthy discussion with the Assistant Commissioner for the Dublin Metropolitan area, the inspector in charge of the Drug Squad and one of the chief superintendents in the DMA on this very chronic problem.
I asked for a quick report, a broad outline of the extent of the problem. I am happy to say that I received this recently and now I have asked for a more detailed report on the drug situation and what measures we might take to reduce it. Of course, it is not an easy matter to tackle. The drug situation in Ireland is but part of a massive international problem. I was in Geneva recently at a meeting of Ministers of Justice of the Council of Europe and there I took the opportunity to discuss with my colleagues the whole drugs question. I am happy to say that there is growing international co-operation which is not confined to Europe but is also in many of the source countries, Africa, the Middle East and South America, trying to prevent the trail of human misery and deprivation. The House can be assured that I, as Minister for Justice, see attention to this terrible problem as one of my top priorities. I will do everything I can to help the Garda reduce the problem and bring those people who import drugs and those who push them to justice.
I remind the Minister that he has five minutes.
In passing I have to say that it has been expressed to me that the penalties for drug pushers should be much more severe than they are. I am prepared to contemplate that. It has also been said to me that perhaps the courts are too lenient in this regard, and that is As matter for the courts to reflect upon. As far as I am concerned no penalty would be too severe for people pushing drugs and thereby peddling human misery.
Unfortunately, the time left to me to reply is very short. I apologise to Deputies that I will not be in a position to reply in detail to the points they made. On prisons, it was mentioned by Deputy Collins that there was exceptional crowding in Mountjoy. It is no more crowded now than it was four months ago. He raised the point of whether I was pursuing a policy of shedding prisoners. All I can say is that I am continuing the policy which I inherited.
Points have been raised about the prisons at Clondalkin with Deputy Collins strongly advocating and some Deputies, notably Deputy Taylor and Deputy Higgins, strongly opposed especially to the women's prison there. Deputy Taylor cited the Official Report when I, in Opposition, opposed the siting of the prison at its present location. That is true, and the record speaks for itself. The question now arises as to whether I, as Minister for Justice having inherited a situation where so much work has been done already and so much public money spent, could in conscience reverse that situation. The Department are committed contractually to work which will keep going until June or July, maybe August or September of next year. That is something over which I have no control. I will be reflecting very carefully on the subject and I will be very interested in it because it concerns my constituency. Deputies can be assured that I will make whatever decision I consider to be in the public interest.
I regret that I was not here for Deputy Higgin's speech. I heard a bit of it. I know of his very long-established interest in the whole area of criminology and all I can say to him is that I will be reading his contribution in the Official Report with great interest. If he is interested in getting help in any aspect of research in the area of criminology he can be assured of my fullest co-operation.
We have reached the appointed time, Minister. You have moved Vote No. 23.
Vote put and agreed to.