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

I tabled a series of parliamentary questions approximately a year or a year and a half ago. My understanding is that, in many cases, stations are nominally there but they never open or they certainly do not open on the given hours, days or weeks. It took me a long while to establish that fact, but that is the way it is. Where I live, the issue is not about a physical building - the Garda barracks - being open for two hours from 10 a.m. to 12 noon every day and so on. The issue is that they want the guard to live in the community. When the guard is in the community, it is a totally different scene. This is not necessarily about high-level crime, but low-level crime. This concerns local matters such as local intelligence. Let us be honest about it. If the guard is at a local football match, involved in a committee or so on, there is a feeling that there is a presence there even though the guard is off duty.

My question is quite simple. Is there a policy to incentivise gardaí in rural areas to live in the communities that they are serving? If a garda is living 40 miles away, comes for eight hours and then goes, if he or she does not hear about it in those eight hours, he or she will never hear about it.

As I said, most rural communities take the view that it is a great boon when the garda is part of the community. Equally, most rural communities would like the primary school teacher to live locally because it creates what we call a community. Having come from Dublin to live in a rural community, I know that the amount of information people get as a result of living in the community is phenomenal. I knew that long before I was in politics.

I wish to put a question to Dr. Singh. I was fascinated by his statistics about crime in the country. It reminds me of the attitude towards politicians. If people are asked whether politicians are any good, 90% of people say they are no good. However, if people are asked whether their local politician, the person they know, is any good, they say he or she is different. I think Dr. Singh is getting the same syndrome. In other words people trust the person they know, but somewhere beyond, everyone is bad in some way. I think we are getting that in spades.

The question of whether there is a policy on having a resident garda was raised. That is a key issue. It is not so much about the physical building and whether it is open at fixed times every day - I understand many of them are not open anyway.

Another issue is the fear level. Dr. Singh seemed to make reassuring comments to the effect that despite all the horror stories, most people go to bed at night and do not worry too much about it, because the risk is rather low. Is that what the statistics suggest? Do they suggest people are worrying disproportionately by comparison with the risk? In other words, people are taking reasonable precautions but are not waking up in the middle of the night in terror. Is that the case?