URGING support for the bail amendment, the Fianna Fail leader, Mr Bertie Ahern, said a Yes vote in next Thursday's referendum "will be the people's way of saying that they have had enough, that crime must be tackled now".
Speaking in Dublin last night, he said crime had become a major threat to our society, giving rise to widespread fear in both rural and urban communities and this could nob longer be tolerated.
"People deserve an effective criminal justice system in which they can have confidence. If suspected criminals commit crimes while on bail awaiting trial, it undermines the work of the Garda Siochana and others who are trying to deal with crime in our society," Mr Ahern said.
The Minister for Social Welfare and leader of Democratic Left, Mr De Rossa, has urged voters to ensure the amendment is decisively carried, "to convey a clear message to the small minority involved in crime that communities are no longer prepared to tolerate thuggery and violence".
He said: "It is never easy to strike a balance between the individual rights of the citizens, on the one hand, and the need for effective measures to protect individuals and communities from crime, on the other. This amendment was agreed by the three Government parties only after the most exhaustive consideration of the issues involved, and I believe that it gets the balance right."
He said the amendment "will give no additional powers to the Government; it will give no extra powers to the gardai; the courts alone are being given this additional option, and experience shows that our courts very reluctantly deprive an accused person of personal liberty".
The Fine Gael Minister of State, Mr Hugh Coveney, has dismissed as "nonsense" any suggestion that convicted prisoners would have to be released to make way for accused persons who were refused bail.
He told a meeting of the Fine Gael Parliamentary Party that the proposed changes were being brought forward against a background of "the most significant prison-building programme in the history of the State", which would increase prison accommodation by one-third between now and 1998.
The chairman of Young Fine Gael, Mr David Byrne, has called on all young people to "let their voices be heard" on the bail issue.
He condemned the "do-gooders" in society "who seem to spend more time protecting the criminal than in giving any rights to the victim".
The Democratic Left Minister of State, Mr Eamon Gilmore, who is directing his party's campaign in the referendum, said the amendment was "designed solely to rein-in serious offenders who persistently commit crimes while on bail, and will in no way diminish the rights either of innocent people or of those charged with a one-off minor offence".
The Garda Commissioner, Mr Patrick Byrne, told the Association of European Journalists in Dublin that he was not going, to get into the public arena debating the rights and wrongs of the bail referendum, but he wanted people to understand what the figures represented.
Last year, the absolute minimum number of offences or crimes committed by people on bail was 5,400. The total number could be anything from 8,000 to 14,000.
"Crime committed by people on bail is a problem, in particular areas of crime: it needs to be addressed but I'm not saying one way or the other as Commissioner of the Garda Siochana what way people should vote in this referendum", Mr Byrne said.