I commend the Labour Party on bringing forward this motion and Deputy Kelly on his persistent work in this area. It has been more than a year since the Minister took office so this motion is a timely opportunity to assess the progress that has actually been made on Garda numbers in the time since. Last year, as the Minister alluded to, there were two high-profile and much-lauded Garda recruitment campaigns. There were 11,000 applications to join the force. That is a very positive story. However, looking at the output, 619 gardaí were actually attested last year. That raises serious questions around the ability to meet the targets of 5,000 new gardaí over the term of the Government or the fact that interest in joining the Garda is not translating into increased numbers. The truth is that no new or innovative measures have been taken since the Minister took office that would increase the number of trainees or encourage existing members to remain. We have had nothing in terms of the Garda allowance or pay progression. Nothing has been done, for example, to encourage those gardaí who have left the force to rejoin. In fact, many of those who have sought to rejoin have found it incredibly difficult to do so. Last autumn, I produced a series of proposals from Sinn Féin that included things like increasing the Garda training allowance to the equivalent of the minimum wage, increasing the maximum capacity per intake at the Garda training college, introducing a return-to-policing grant to incentivise those who have left the force to rejoin, removing points on the Garda pay scale so that gardaí can progress faster on it, introducing an annual long-service payment and increasing the mandatory retirement age to 65. Each and every one of those proposals could have made an impact but none has been taken on board. This is important because the issue of Garda numbers is not an abstract debate. All of us are aware of situations of unmanned Garda stations or stations that are open for minimal hours. We are all aware of the lack of Garda visibility in many of our communities and on our streets. Those of us who are at the coalface of communities are very much aware of the lack of community gardaí to build relationships with young people and deal with diversion from crime. We are very well aware of the fact we do not have enough roads policing gardaí to ensure safety on our roads. We are all very well aware of the over-dependence on overtime to carry out routine police work. I have spoken to the Minister on a number of occasions about how we are coming into a period in the second half of this year when, in my view, the Garda will be overstretched with big events such as those following from the EU Presidency and so on. In the past, gardaí have been pulled from communities into Dublin city centre for those large-scale events. When we have quite a number of them taking place, I have a genuine fear, which has not been addressed, that we will see under-policing in many of our communities. We need more gardaí but we also need those gardaí to be trained and held to the highest professional standards. We need to look at how we train, educate and pay gardaí if we want to ensure we have the best police service possible. We need to ensure gardaí have access to education and training on an ongoing basis, given the complexities of new laws and technology they are expected to deal with. The public has to have confidence in the governance and management of An Garda Síochána and that requires fully addressing the number of gardaí who are working on domestic, sexual and gender-based violence as well as ensuring the organisation responds to such cases properly. We need to listen to people like Margaret Loftus, a former garda herself, and address how gardaí are handling or sometimes mishandling internal complaints and allegations of criminality and how members who challenge wrongdoing within the organisation are treated. We have seen in the Garda, as elsewhere, that protecting whistleblowers is not always considered a priority. We want to ensure gardaí are held to the highest standards and that internal Garda investigations are fair and transparent. We want to have a police service that has the confidence of our communities. I commend and thank the gardaí in my constituency on their ongoing work under very difficult circumstances because the truth of the matter is that, just as in every other constituency, there are not enough of them.

Sentiment score: 0.25