I want to start by thanking my colleague, Deputy Kelly, for bringing forward this motion, and to express my disappointment in the Government's proposal to amend it today because we very much need to acknowledge the incredible work An Garda Síochána is doing across our country. As a Dublin Central TD, the Dublin riots will be an image and experience that will forever condition my approach to how we need to police in Dublin. There was a very strong sense in the wake of that event that things would never be the same again. It exposed the city and An Garda Síochána to awful events. In the three years since then, there has been a major effort by gardaí to improve visibility and to engage with communities but they are effectively doing this by running to try to stand still. While we are very grateful there is a significant chunk of the recruits coming out of Templemore being allocated to the Garda stations, in particular in the north inner city, the reality is we have fewer gardaí now than what we had pre-pandemic. We have four gardaí fewer compared to December 2019. During that time, we have had a significant increase in population, and that is the challenge the gardaí on our streets are currently facing. Unfortunately, the gardaí locally are accused of being soft on kids on scramblers and I want to reject that. The gardaí have a very delicate balancing act between not making martyrs of teenagers or children and maintaining the trust of the local community. Work has been done to try to confiscate scramblers but we know so much more has to be done, and there is a clear need by Garda leadership, particularly by the Commissioner, to ensure that message is sent to gardaí on the ground. They must intervene to a much greater extent. We also need to see the deployment of technology, like in Manchester where drones were deployed, to try to take scramblers off our streets. Ultimately, when we look at the resources gardaí have for dealing with those underage and with children, the number of juvenile liaison officers, JLOs, in our community does not inspire confidence. We have only four across DMR north central, and we cannot get away from the fact we have too few people dealing with the children on the ground. In regard to domestic violence and the very real concern about the inconsistency across the country, across the 21 Garda divisions, only seven have domestic abuse co-ordination teams. There are 13 in Dublin and one in Dundalk, and none for the rest of the country. We have to change that.

Sentiment score: 0.05