The Minister for Justice, Mr O'Donoghue, will endeavour to breathe new life today into his "zero tolerance" approach to crime. Mr O'Donoghue is to restate his and the Government's commitment to the zero-tolerance strategy, the centrepiece of Fianna Fail's anticrime policies during the general election.
In a speech to a business group in Galway this afternoon, the Minister is to outline his vision of zero tolerance and how it will be implemented.
Mr O'Donoghue has been prompted to speak on the topic following suggestions that some of the requirements of zero tolerance were being quietly dropped, and that the Minister himself was reluctant to discuss the theme.
"He has been a Minister for nearly three months and we have hardly heard a squeak out of him. It's far from zero tolerance we're seeing now. It's zero Minister. Where is he?" the Fine Gael justice spokesman, Mr Jim Higgins, asked in a statement last Wednesday.
Today, Mr O'Donoghue is to reaffirm his commitment to the strategy, based on the policing theory that every law should be enforced, as failure to prosecute lesser offences encourages offenders to commit more serious crimes.
The Minister is expected to argue that he has a two-pronged approach. A Criminal Justice Bill to be published within three weeks will seek to implement a number of Fianna Fail election promises, including mandatory 10-year sentences for serious drug trafficking.
In addition the Minister believes the Government's prison-building programme, boosted by a plan for a 400-space prison at Portlaoise, funded and built by the private sector, will provide enough prison spaces for those committed to jail.
The Minister says the zero-tolerance concept has been "trivialised" by critics who suggest is means devoting Garda resources to pursuing buskers and people who fail to pay their bus fare, an interpretation first voiced by the Garda Commissioner, Mr Pat Byrne.
The Criminal Justice Bill is also to introduce ways to speed up the work of the courts, including abolition of the preliminary examination stage of trials.