Ireland appears to have exported its "gang wars" to Spain, Labour leader Eamon Gilmore suggested in the Dáil yesterday, in the wake of the murder of a known Dublin drug dealer on the Costa Del Sol on Monday.
The Labour leader, who repeated his comment that 78 murders in 2007 represented the highest number of killings in the State since the Civil War, said the trend was continuing, with the gun murder in Sligo and the attempted murder in Dublin of a well-known criminal.
Taoiseach Bertie Ahern said, however, that gardaí worked closely with international law enforcement agencies "in targeting the activities of Irish criminals who operate outside the jurisdiction".
A number of Garda liaison officers had been posted to London, Paris, Madrid and The Hague "to liaise with law enforcement authorities in those jurisdictions in the context of serious criminal activity with an Irish dimension"; an officer had been appointed to Interpol in Lyons; while another officer would soon be assigned to the analysis and operations centre based in Lisbon, which is the EU's drug trafficking and intelligence and interdiction centre.
This was necessary "because many such criminals try to operate on a hands-off basis in this jurisdiction by having others carry out their activities while living abroad themselves".
Mr Gilmore called on the Government to increase greatly the numbers of community gardaí by deploying the larger numbers of gardaí graduating shortly from Templemore. He also urged the establishment of a statutorily based witness protection programme and called for improving the basis on which gardaí could engage in surveillance.
The Labour leader said: "I do not subscribe to the notion that whenever a crime takes place, the Government is at fault. However, it is the Government's responsibility to reverse the trend of increasing crime in the State." He pointed to the latest CSO figures showing headline crime for the last quarter in 2007 had risen by 6 per cent.
The Taoiseach said that there had been a 68 per cent detection rate in murder cases.
Mr Gilmore responded, however, that when Mr Ahern entered office in 1997, he did so "on the promise of zero tolerance of crime, yet the country is now being asked to tolerate levels of crime that are far higher than they were when he entered office".
The Labour leader agreed that many crimes were linked to the drugs trade and "much border-hopping is being done by criminals".
He believed, however, that "surveillance technology should be capable of identifying criminals, the nature of their activities and putting them behind bars. We have recently seen convictions being secured on the basis of tracking the locations of mobile phones", which was the way the Labour Party proposed improvements in the powers of Garda surveillance.
Mr Ahern acknowledged that technology kept advancing, but he said: "I know those involved in criminal activity are probably some of the best clients of the mobile phone industries because they change their phones every day. They discard them so technology cannot trace them."
The Criminal Justice Act 2007 had restricted bail and dealt with people involved in drug trafficking, firearms offences or other serious crimes, he said.
"It introduced tighter controls over post-release activity, enhanced penalties for those who re-offend within seven years, mandatory minimum sentences in cases of drug trafficking and firearms offences and the indefinite retention of fingerprint samples. All these fairly draconian measures are now law and available to the Garda in its activities."
