Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I would like to refer to an interesting statistic that was mentioned by Mr. Nolan. He indicated that An Garda Síochána estimates that crime "statistics divide on a ratio of 70:30" between urban and rural areas. This seems to be in line with something I perceive every week, which is that the risk of my house in rural Connemara being broken into is statistically much less than the risk of the house in Dublin I stay in being broken into. Even though it might not have done my political standing much good, I have been careful over the years not to frighten people in rural Ireland too much. There has been a tendency to exaggerate the threat to people in rural Ireland, particularly in the more rural parts of rural Ireland. This has not done anything to make them safer, but it has certainly had an impact on their quality of life.

I would be interested to know whether the witnesses find that what I call "motorway crime", such as aggravated burglary by organised gangs, decreases the more one gets away from the main arteries and the more one gets to the far reaches of the State. I know this is a big question. Is there a big difference between the type, if not necessarily the volume, of crime in an area depending on whether it is an hour down the motorway from Dublin on the main road to somewhere else or is three or fours away from a major centre of population? Although fantastic schemes like text alert are getting the job done, I worry at times that we are putting fear in people's hearts - I am thinking of old people in particular - without really doing anything for them. This can have a negative impact on their quality of life.

Is there a sense within the force that rural Ireland starts at Bohernabreena and goes to Blacksod and therefore is not a very homogenous area? In my constituency, there is a big difference between Barna and Carna. It is not just a question of replacing the "B" with a "C". Do gardaí find that the type of crime changes as they move further out? My understanding is that a great deal of rural crime is not high-level crime and is quite local. Local gardaí living in communities cannot do anything against crimes carried out by big well-organised gangs that come down to suss the place out. It takes huge resources to track these dangerous gangs and to try to overcome them. There is a big debate in rural areas about how gardaí can deal with young people of 19 or 20 years of age who are going a little off the rails and prevent local issues, as opposed to the imported issues, from developing in these communities. Every community in Ireland would like a resident garda. It is not about Garda stations. I do not believe it does a heap against crime to open a station for two hours a day. It is handy to get the passport stamped, but most rural gardaí are fairly handy and they can get things stamped.

The big issue we find on the ground is the need for a resident garda presence to deal with local crime, as opposed to big organised crime. It is useless against the latter form of crime. I am talking about local issues like young people going wild with their cars. The witnesses know all about the things that local people in certain age groups tend to do. Gardaí work for 40 hours a week, but if there is a resident garda, there is a sense that he or she is always around the local area. That can have a massive impact. Resident gardaí can use their local knowledge to have a word with a young person or tap his or her parents on the shoulder, as it were. That might be sufficient to deal with the matter without the young person ever having to appear in any record or any court. As far as I am concerned, it is not about having a Garda station in the rural community. It is about having a resident garda in that community not to prevent high-level crime but to prevent the low-level stuff that happens in all vibrant local communities. What is the policy in that regard? Is An Garda Síochána incentivised to put in people who want to live in the rural communities they serve? People in most rural communities, including the place where I live, which has always been lucky enough to have a local garda, will say if they are asked that they want to have local gardaí, not to preserve them from high levels of crime but to deal with local stuff. In their reply, will the witnesses give us a sense of the extent to which high-level organised criminal activity decreases as one moves away from the cities and, as a result, gardaí are more focused on the unorganised local issues that have to be dealt with by police all over the world?