Regarding a National Safety Camera Strategy, I have no objections to any of that but what I would like to see is some joined-up thinking. In a lot of areas in County Limerick at the moment, an awful lot of robberies are taking place, and the gardaí under pressure with the numbers they have. What I would like to see rolled out in the camera strategy is number plate recognition, which would help An Garda Síochána catch the vehicles of those involved in robbing people at night, during the day or whenever. It could track them going through all the different towns, villages and byroads they are using and give that data directly to the Garda services. We have a limited number of gardaí in this country, so we need to use technology to help them. We also need it to protect people's lives and people's homes. I would like to see number plate recognition come in. An investigation has been going on for six weeks in my area, trying to locate people who have been in people's backyards and at the back of their houses looking for opportunities to rob them. Yet, we cannot track down these vehicles. We have descriptions of them but An Garda Síochána cannot seem to track them down. If we had number plate recognition cameras on the roads, we would be able to find out the location of these vehicles, where they are coming from, where they are going to, and we would be able to assist the gardaí. We can also use them for the speeding offences - 100%. If we are going to have national safety cameras, we should also have them for the protection of people's properties and lives. That means we have the full data for our Garda services. I was at the budgetary oversight committee yesterday, and I had done a small bit of research myself. The witnesses at the committee - professors and doctors - outlined research and asked about rural Ireland. They listed all the things in rural Ireland that should be improved - speed limits and all the rest of it. I asked them where they from. All three of them were from Dublin. They made comments about the whole country but all their data and research was based in Dublin. There are 32 counties in Ireland. There is more than Dublin in Ireland. When they are doing research, they need to research the whole country.

Sentiment score: 0.09