Oireachtas Joint Committee on Justice: The Government is planning a range of measures to widen the powers of the Garda to combat gang crime and strengthen the penalties against serious crime, the Minister for Justice said yesterday.
Mr McDowell insisted that the Garda was winning the fight against crime and said the force had enough resources to do its job.
But while he said the fundamentals of the criminal justice system were among the best in the world, he told a meeting of the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Justice that new powers were needed to improve the capacity of the Garda to detect serious crime.
These include an extension of the force's powers of arrest to include offences such as conspiracy and attempting to pervert the course of justice.
In addition, Mr McDowell said, he favoured giving the prosecution the right of appeal in criminal cases.
The package in a forthcoming Criminal Justice Bill also will also provide for the extension of general search powers, which are currently limited, to include all arrestable offences.
Senior gardaí, not below the rank of superintendent, will also be empowered to issue a 24-hour search warrant.
But while Mr McDowell said he was considering the incorporation into Irish law of EU and UN legal mechanisms to provide a definition of a criminal gang, such mechanisms required that a criminal organisation must in some way be "structural".
He drew a distinction between some criminal gangs and paramilitary organisations such as the IRA which had a clear agenda and fixity of structure.
Some criminal gangs were unlikely to have any such permanency of organisation and agenda, he added.
The Minister wants to give the Garda the power to draw inferences of criminal activity from the possession of certain documents and items such as cable ties, boiler suits and disguises.
Speaking against the possibility of using the Special Criminal Court to try certain crimes alleged to be committed by gang members, he said such a measure might do more harm than good to the criminal justice system.
Anyone sentenced to life should serve at least 12 years, "the great majority of their adult years for the foreseeable future".
He was not happy that people sentenced to life should be released after seven to 11 years.
He said that he wanted to appoint more judges, and that the Government was considering the construction of a special building in Dublin where witnesses would be kept separately from the accused.
There were tetchy exchanges at the committee between Mr McDowell and the Fine Gael justice spokesman, Mr John Deasy, who said the morale of the Garda had never been so low.
He accused the Minister of producing "a wrapped plethora of legislation" to deal with what was a policing problem due to inadequate resources.
Mr McDowell rejected these remarks as superficial and glib and said he had endeavoured at the Cabinet to get "every last ha'penny" for the force. The size of the force would increase to a record strength of 12,200 by the end of 2004, he said.
Mr McDowell said the opposition appeared not to the believe Garda statistics which showed that the crime rate was falling.
"The Garda Síochána has never had the level of resources which it has this year and next. I am tired, I have to say, of people constantly running it down," he said.
Mr Deasy countered that it was the Minister himself who had alleged that some gardaí had taken bribes.
Mr McDowell said later that he had no role or input into the actual deployment of gardaí in particular areas.
But Labour's justice spokesman, Mr Joe Costello, said that was not true. He cited a section of the 1924 Garda Síochána Act which said that members "shall be distributed and stationed throughout Saorstát Éireann in such manner as the minister shall from time to time direct".
