Terrorist-style courts may be set up to convict gangland criminals, the Taoiseach Bertie Ahern today told the Dáil.
Minister for Justice Brian Lenihan today briefed the Cabinet on the garda investigation into the weekend murder of armed robber John Daly in a taxi in Finglas on Dublin's northside.
The Special Criminal Court was set up during the Troubles in 1972 to try paramilitary groups on the evidence of senior gardaí.
Mr Ahern said that gun murder investigations were being hampered by witnesses unwilling to give evidence because of intimidation by gangs.
He said: "We've seen how the Special Criminal Court worked in the past where it's on the word of members of gardaí who have the information and these are things we have to look at.
"But they're not entirely the kind of things that I would like to operate. But if gangs continue to try to do what they're doing then we as legislators will be forced to look at some of these issues.
"But we have to consider them carefully."
Mr Ahern said that detection rates in non-gangland related murders were more successful because of greater co-operation from the community.
He added: "Those that are threatened won't speak. Associates of those killed won't speak. Not even when it is in their own interests, to save their own lives, will they co-operate. That is creating a lot of pressure for the gardai.
"Gardaí need evidence. The system is an evidence-based system. But they are finding it horrendously difficult in Dublin and in at least one other city. But that doesn't mean gardai are giving up.
"The gardaí can't be in every driveway, in every pub car park, on every highway, watching every known criminal. They just can't do that."
Labour leader Eamon Gilmore called for the expansion of the witness protection programme to cover gangland crimes, legislation to outlaw membership of criminal gangs and for the full implementation of the National Drugs Strategy.
He added: "Gardaí are not on top of it because they're not in the community. We don't have a system of community policing that people can be in touch with.
"Since you became Taoiseach there are children who are born, 10 years ago, who are on a conveyor belt to criminal activity. Growing up on crime. The people who deal with them know where their future is heading.
Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny said that everybody in the country recognises that Ireland has become a far less civilised place to live in over the last ten years.
"In that time gun crime has doubled, trebled, quadrupled. Gun murders are six times what they were in 1998 and detection is down by 75 per cent. Conviction rates have fallen and it seems that zero tolerance is a long gone, distant memory. It appears that the Taoiseach has given up on this job."
He told TDs that geography, environment and local circumstances all dictate that the John Daly's of this world die because of the inability of the Government to deal with gangland crime.
PA