I welcome this brief opportunity to talk about Garda resourcing. I spoke very recently about how the actual number of gardaí per head of population is lower now than it was in 2008, which is a shocking indictment of the system. The Minister needs to get more gardaí into the system and obviously that means paying them, along with other public sector workers, a fair and decent wage and getting rid of the yellow-pack pay and conditions that were brought in during the times of austerity. Equally, we have to provide opportunities for gardaí to live and work in communities. We can possibly look introducing a Dublin allowance for people living in very expensive areas. In my constituency, the cost of affordable housing keeps going up because of demand. I have spoken about that before as well. We do not have public sector workers living in areas where they are able to see what is going on in their daily lives as opposed to their working lives. When I raised the issue of antisocial behaviour in a Private Members' motion last year, the Minister gave a commitment that he would look at freeing up Garda time. I gave the example of a school where stones were being thrown at the school by people who are trying to rob bikes and the Garda response was "sorry, the car is in at the courts". Obviously, for antisocial behaviour orders, a sergeant or someone of a higher rank is needed to go in but a lot of Garda time is spent in court testifying when it could be done more efficiently through video. This would free up gardaí to operate on the ground. The key element of this motion is the reduction in community gardaí. They are the ones at the forefront identifying problems as they arise and we need to resource that particular grouping in particular.

Sentiment score: 0.12