Pádraig Mac Lochlainn (Donegal North East, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The Commissioner will be aware there is considerable concern about the station closures and the resources available to the Garda Síochána, most notably from the Garda Representative Association which represents the overwhelming majority of gardaí on the ground. We all know and respect gardaí in our community. We have conversations with them and they are concerned about resources available but our responsibility as parliamentarians, particularly in this committee, is to try to ensure that the gardaí on the ground have the resources required to protect us and to do their job.

The former assistant Commissioner, Martin Donlan, wrote an article recently in The Sunday Business Post and with his vast experience described the unique situation in Ireland where there has been a strong relationship between local communities and the Garda Síochána over the years. The statistics published not long ago on levels of crime reported to a Garda station indicated that they were quite low across many rural areas. That reflects the strength of that relationship in terms of having gardaí embedded in communities and having the intelligence required to deal with crime. There is a concern about that becoming a mobile facility centralised in a larger town where people are travelling around that might be lost. How would the Commissioner address those concerns?