In the special Monday session of Parliament, MPs from both sides of the political divide used the motion to adjourn debate to lament the violence which took place aboard the on Friday night during a booze cruise.

Violence broke out aboard the ship about three hours into the cruise and Police have said the clashes started between women linked to the Town and Country rival gangs. Four women landed in hospital as a result of the incident ? two with stab wounds an two others with lesser injuries. One of the stab victims suffered a collapsed lung in the melee and is now recovering in hospital in stable condition.

Two teenage girls were arrested in connection with the violence but many other individuals were involved and one man even held a knife to the throat of Captain Joseph Bailey and threatened to kill him if he did not move the boat away from the dock at Dockyard where he had stopped to disembark trapped passengers.

There were also unconfirmed reports that at least one person involved in the melee had a gun.

In the House of Assembly on Monday,questioned why the fire truck managed to reach the stricken MV at Dockyard before Police when violence erupted Friday night.

He said Police were stretched with many working long hours covering for absent colleagues.voiced his support for Government in tackling the violence and called for a joint select committee to look at rising violence which he said had reached the scale of terrorism.

?We have to bring back in some tough cops, like in New York City where they cleaned up their streets or other metropolitan areas like Detroit and Atlanta.?said too often the parents support their children only when they are in trouble.

Some families are also benefiting financially from drugs being sold by their children, he said.

Mr. Butler said opportunity abounds in Bermuda, which does not have the excuse of mass unemployment for social unrest, but it is being blown by youngsters who are increasingly hanging out on street corners.

Mr. Butler was one of many MPs to lament the loss of corporal punishment from school and the move to liberal values in which, he said, shouting at a child was viewed as emotional abuse as was putting them in detention. called for Government to take a long hard look at graduation figures which showed only 53 percent of public school students graduating.

?It is troubling if you look at who is in the public schools ? 92 percent are black. In the private schools 75 percent are white.? agreed with colleague that prisons are too easy for offenders, adding: ?I get concerned when prisoners get better health care than our seniors.?

He said prisoners have access to drugs, cell phones, radio and TV and he raised concerns about the consistency of sentencing.

He called for hiring a force of 30 people ? either attached to the army or Police ? to crackdown on lawlessness.

But he said they would need support from the community and the courts to work. called for politicians to tone down their language in talking to each other because she said it is picked up in the community. said when he was in his late teens there was no place he was scared to go to but now people who are not even involved in gangs are attacked when they leave their neighbourhoods.

He said recalled around three years ago a 19-year-old Somerset man was chased from a gas station and caught and beaten up on East Broadway by Town youths following a game at BAA.

Mr. Lister recalled: ?He said ?I should not have been in Town?. None of us knew anything about that.?

And he said he then came across a Warwick man who was sacked from a job going door-to-door because he was frightened to go to certain parishes.

But Mr. Lister said the rush to call for tougher measures made him uncomfortable. ?We are in an age of rehabilitation. We want to make it work,? he said.

One problem is people spend long periods on remand where programmes are not mandatory and then the courts free them because they have spent so long in custody.

He said the reality is, when men in their late 20s are locked up they leave children aged ten or 11 behind, who then cause havoc in schools and frustrate mothers.

Turning to education, he said, Government is not satisfied with the public school graduation rates but it is not fair to compare them to private schools.

One private school with a high graduation rate had 21 pupils in that year, said Mr. Lister compared to CedarBridge and Berkeley which have hundreds.

And he said those schools have to take drop-outs from private schools who might then go on to fail there while they were removed from the statistics of the private schools.

He said CedarBridge teachers are so dedicated they put on extra lessons for dozens of pupils who were failing in maths and English with days to go before graduation. Some of them went on to pass the re-sits.

He said media attacks on CedarBridge are unwarranted and the school has produced a student who is going to Johns Hopkins medical school.

Evidence of the problems in public schools are to be found in the work of guidance counsellors, said Mr. Lister, who instead of spending the majority of time talking about careers and work release might spend all day counselling one child with behavioural issues.

Mr. Lister said the literacy and maths programme would boost results and the IT programme should be the envy of the world.

He said Government computers are going to needy homes to make sure no one is left behind.

Responding to a call by colleague Wayne Perinchief to send violent prisoners abroad, said the British Government had been sounded out about the possibility of Bermuda exporting prisoners when she was Home Affairs Minister.

But she said there were human rights considerations in that prisoners should have access to their families.

said he was optimistic good sense would prevail.

He said the violence was caused by young black men who felt disenfranchised but there are examples of people turning things around.