Minister for Justice Michael McDowell has rejected a description of antisocial behaviour orders (Asbos) as "a charter for cranks, crackpots, mutton heads and gobshites to score cheap points off neighbours and young people".
He was responding on the second day of the Communities First conference, in Dublin, to comments from Cathleen O'Neill, of the Kilbarrack Community Development Project. Ms O'Neill said working class communities such as hers would bear "the unequal brunt of these orders" .
She said community curfews would "undermine our work and further alienate young people".
Asbos would "criminalise people for civil offences", would "cause communities to criminalise young people," and were "counter to the Children's Act", she added.
However, Mr McDowell said we have to get a "sense of right and wrong back into our discourse [ about crime]" and move away "from the gobbledegook of excuses that seem to exclude fundamental value judgments of what is right and what is wrong".
He described as "an awful lot of complete cock-and-bull" the stories of many who came to Ireland seeking asylum.
He predicted that if the law was not enforced in this area "Ireland will play straight into the hands of racists who will say the State is not doing enough about asylum seekers".
The Minister said he radically disagreed that Asbos were going to criminalise people. It was "completely wrong" to say they were counter to the Children's Act, when they would involve integrating the juvenile justice system.
As for a community curfew, he "hadn't heard a word about it." In Ireland "we are not following the British model", which employed such curfews, he said.
The Asbos would "not be crank driven" but would allow a senior garda or judge to deal with situations where the criminal law was inadequate to do so, he said.
They would afford protection from bullying in the community and "neighbours from hell" of people who had no access to lawyers, people such as "the little old lady in the gable house at the end of the road whose life is being made miserable by a group of youths".
He knew such protection was necessary "from my own experience as a TD".
In such circumstance, with Asbos, a senior garda or judge would have the power to say to abusers "if you do it again we will punish you", he said.
Speaking of the Garda Bill he said it was "the most vital piece of legislation on policing we have ever had in this State". It proposed "a new relationship between the Garda Síochána and the community".
Currently that relationship was "informal at best". He wanted to bring about an entirely new situation where the relationship was as "of right".
Local councillors and gardaí would be partners on community policing, he said, insisting this was how it would be developed and that it would not end up as "the Cinderella of policing in Ireland. It is a priority area in its own right".
There would also be "a renewed emphasis on highly visible local policing" he said, acknowledging that, with many gardaí living some distance from the communities they served, "local knowledge is under stress" and "the relationship between the community and the gardaí is not as it was before".
