On a visit to Northern Ireland, Sir Keir Starmer is asked whether Operation Early Dawn posed a risk to public safety, in respect of policing resources being diverted or prisoners being bailed when they otherwise would not be. “Well, these decisions are really tough decisions, and nobody wants to take them, they are difficult decisions," he tells reporters at the PSNI's training college in Belfast. Report by Blairm. Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/itn and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/itn
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00:00Well, these decisions are really tough decisions and nobody wants to take them, they're difficult
00:04decisions. They're having to be taken for one reason, and one reason only, and that
00:09is the terrible inheritance on prisons that we had as an incoming government from the
00:13previous government. There was a basic failure, which is a failure to have enough prison places
00:19for the number of prisoners that were being sentenced to prison. That is about as basic
00:23a failure of government from the previous government as you could possibly have got.
00:28We've had to deal with that, with the additional strain of the disorder of recent weeks. But
00:33as I hope we've been able to demonstrate, we've taken tough decisions. We've been able
00:37to prove that if you commit disorder, you can expect to be put through the criminal
00:42justice system quickly, and we will continue in that vein. But I'm not going to pretend
00:46that this isn't a challenge. We will take the necessary tough decisions on this, but
00:51we should never, ever have been put in a position that we're in today. We are managing that
00:56risk, and of course these are tough decisions. But I think you've seen over the last two
01:01or three weeks the way in which we've approached this, which is to make sure that any risk
01:07is mitigated, to make sure that we do have the spaces available for the prisoners that
01:11we need to be held in prison. We've managed that against very difficult circumstances,
01:16I can tell you. And for my part, I think the response of criminal justice to the recent
01:21disorders has been a major reason that the disorders have subsided for the time being.