Mr. Niall Featherstone:

I welcome the suggestion from Deputy Healy-Rae and his comments on the fear around people advertising on social media when they are going on holidays. This is something of which An Garda Síochána is cognisant. We ran a campaign two years ago - perhaps we should run another campaign now - to remind the public of the dangers of advertising where they are going, whether inside the country or leaving the country.

People need to be a bit cuter and cleverer and should not expose where they are when they go out of the country because we have anecdotal evidence that some criminals are looking at Facebook to find out when individuals are away from home. We have done a bit of work on that in the national crime prevention unit and we have done some work on "Crimecall", which is broadcast once a month. It has a dedicated crime prevention slot and we have raised that issue before and will consider doing that again soon because it is very tangible. While social media has dangers we can use it to our advantage to get that key message out.

The Deputy mentioned the peninsulas his constituency straddles. We are aware of the areas covered by coastal watch. There has been a coastal watch policy in An Garda Síochána in recent decades but it needs to be reinvigorated. We plan to do that through our community policing people who are in the communities in urban and rural areas. Coastal watch is a rural issue and we are cognisant of the inter-agency approach between the Irish Coast Guard and An Garda Síochána. There have been several excellent drug detections in the past couple of years by those bodies. We do not want to be overconfident. I thank the Deputy for raising that issue today because it is to the fore on our radar.