In the Seanad on 2nd March 2006, on the 2nd Stage of the Criminal Justice (Mutual Assistance) Bill 2005, I said:

While I welcome the Bill, it does not go far enough. If we believe the arrangements in this legislation will be enough to cope with the threats our society faces from criminals in the 21st century, we are wrong, although this may be all the Minister is able to do at present.

Four years ago I met Vaclav Klaus, the former Prime Minister of the Czech Republic who is now President. We had a good debate and I got to know him over a couple of days. I showed my enthusiasm for a united Europe but he talked about his concern having worked for approximately 40 years with a big brother in Moscow. He did not want to substitute the big brother in Moscow with one in Brussels. He was quite against a centralised Europe on that basis.

One of the areas of subsidiarity of great benefit to us is the ability to make decisions in our own country. However, there are times when we must consider that is not nearly enough and that there are occasions - this is one of them - when we need something more. The success of Irish legislation in recent years, including the Criminal Assets Bureau legislation, is the envy of other European countries but it has also been recognised that criminals have been able to move out of Ireland and operate elsewhere. Given the ease with which one can travel and communicate, whether by telephone or e-mail, Irish criminals can live in Spain and Holland which perhaps do not have the same legislation we have.

These fairly weak co-operation arrangements, namely, the subject matter of the Bill, are as much concerned with preserving the individual turf of different member states as they are with addressing the real problem. I do not question the sincerity or even the efficiency of the people who must operate these arrangements but they are forced to deal with tools and weapons and to work under systems which are totally unsuited to the size and nature of the task they face.

If one went to America and suggested to people there that they could do without the FBI, they would laugh in one?s face. I saw a television programme recently about the Wild West which referred to the Pinkertons. The Pinkertons was a private organisation whereby if people in the Wild West wanted help, they sent for this private company to solve the problem. America has local police forces stretching up to state level but beyond that, nearly 100 years ago, it found it necessary to create a federal law enforcement agency to cope with those crimes and criminals who traversed state borders and who could not be dealt with adequately by the forces of the individual states no matter how much those local forces co-operated with each other.

I suggest Europe is in the same position today. We need a European police force and not only more co-operation between the forces of member states. I say that even though I am a strong champion of the principle of subsidiarity. Anything which can be handled better at local level should not be handled at a higher level within the Union. However, subsidiarity cuts both way in that what cannot be handled adequately at local level must be dealt with centrally.

I am well aware Ireland?s traditional position has been to resist any moves towards integration of the criminal justice system, and I know the Minister?s heart is in that as well. Part of our reluctance comes from the nature of our legal system as well as the British one, as opposed to the Napoleonic code. We have quite a different system to that operated by most of our partners. As a result, I can well understand the reluctance of the legal establishment here to get involved in any integration which would threaten to undermine the system we have and to which we have grown used over the years.

It is wrong to use that housekeeping issue as an excuse not to address this problem. To be blunt about it, it is taking an enormous risk with the welfare and safety of our people. If we succeed in maintaining every last button of our traditional legal system and do so at the expense of leaving the Union as a whole inadequately equipped to deal with the challenge of international crime, particularly terrorism, what will we have achieved?

In the current climate, it is not fashionable to suggest anything which involves further integration in the European Union but the urgency of this problem surely demands that we leave questions of fashion aside and address ourselves to meeting the real life problems every country in the Union faces. If we do not face up to these problems, we will expect a 19th century structure to cope with a 21st century problem and we will only have ourselves to blame for the consequences of such a short-sighted approach.