New laws - including a zero-tolerance attitude to drug-dealing - are to be introduced to deal with the threat of gangland crime.

Tanaiste Frances Fitzgerald also wants to make it easier for the proceeds of crime to be seized from criminals.

She has this morning asked her cabinet colleagues to sign off on new measures which would lower the threshold beyond which the Criminal Assets Bureau can seize cash from suspected criminals.

Previous attempts to adopt a zero-tolerance policy on drug-dealing have been dismissed as draconian or over-the-top, but opposition parties have this morning given the plans a guarded welcome.

Meanwhile a former minister says his support for the former Garda Commissioner Martin Callinan would have been undermined, if he knew he was trying to undermine the whistleblower Maurice McCabe.

The Labour leader Brendan Howlin publicly stated his confidence in Callinan at the time - but says he would not have been as quick to do so, had he known of a secret meeting between the commissioner and the then-chairman of the Public Accounts Committee.

Our political correspondent Gavan Reilly filed this report for Today FM's National Lunchtime News: