Where is the Opposition????

Messing with the criminal justice system three months before an election, playing politics with the law, abandoning all our rights for the sake of a few cheap headlines. Words cannot express how low an act I feel that An Tanaiste is perpetrating on the Irish people in his latest reaction to gangland crime.

4 years we waited for the Minister to start recruiting the extra Garda he promised and his first step in this was a Garda reserve that as of yet numbers about 100. He promised resources and he didn't deliver. He made claims about criminals being dying wasps on their last sting. Yesterday the same guff was splurted, these new laws marked the end of gangland crime.

Minister McDowell's period in office has been marked by such knee jerk reactions to crime. It is unfortunate that as he prepares to launch the largest single assault on civil liberties in Ireland, by giving additional and unjustifiable powers to a police force desperately in need of institutional reform and proper resourcing, that the opposition has gone AWOL. Where is the voice of reason on the opposition benches to point out that this is political chicanary. Undoubtedly the shinners will scream, but their credentials will do little to help the argument. Who else will stand up and be counted.

Hard cases make bad law, and Minister McDowell was rarely anything but a hard case.