Seán Kenny (Dublin North East, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Commissioner to the meeting and thank her for her opening statement. I also join with other speakers in extending our sympathy to the family of Garda Golden.

My first question relates to the upsurge in crime during the recent Halloween festival. It is normally an event for family and children but this year, in parts of Dublin, including my constituency, there were a number of quite serious incidents. One of them involved an attack on an ambulance in Donaghmede in an attempt to get the patient out of the ambulance. Understandably, they did not succeed, but the ambulance was immobilised and another ambulance had to come to its assistance. Another public order incident occurred in Clare Hall, a fairly large estate, which received quite an amount of coverage in the media. That happened on Halloween night. The third incident took place at Beaumont Hospital, where a man was stabbed on Halloween night. Apparently, the man had been assaulted or stabbed a few hours earlier in the Priorswood area. I know Halloween was on a Saturday night this year and Saturday nights tend to have a higher incidence of this behaviour, but the level of anti-social behaviour on that night needs to be looked at. Normally, there are incidents around bonfires and the kind of anti-social behaviour that takes place when things get out of hand, but what happened on this occasion was on a different level and there would appear to have been some kind of criminal involvement in some of it. Could the Commissioner devise a strategy to deal with that in case it happens again?