Shane Cassells (Meath West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the acting Garda Commissioner and wish him well in his role. It was certainly one of the shortest opening statements we are likely to get in the Committee of Public Accounts. It is hugely regrettable that the acting Garda Commissioner has taken the decision not to honour the commitment to release the report into the reopening of Garda stations. The key point is the fact it will not be done is a blow to transparency, which was already damaged during the hearings we held with members of An Garda Síochána during the first half of this year. That has been played out well enough in the public domain up to this point. Something we should dwell on for a moment is that this will cause huge anger in the rest of the country, particularly rural areas where those 139 stations were closed or scaled down to buzzer boxes, which is, in effect, the same thing. At the same time, they see pictures in the Irish Independentof the smiley head of the Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport holding up a poster with his local councillor saying he got Stepaside reopened. This is the context to this. The people in my county, be in it Athboy, Oldcastle, Castlepollard or Enfield, will find that very hard to swallow this morning.

The last time Garda management were before us in July with the former Commissioner, a meeting attended by the acting Garda Commissioner, I held up the front page of my local newspaper, the Meath Chronicle. It contained the headline "Out of control" and concerned crime in Meath at the time. Would the acting Garda Commissioner believe that this morning's edition of the Meath Chroniclecontains a headline that screams "Shock rise in Meath crime" regarding crime statistics? The figure is up 59%. Huge parts of my county are under extreme pressure. A huge part of my county and everyone else's county is bereft of the physical presence of the force. I wrote to the acting Garda Commissioner this week because the chief superintendent in my county, Fergus Healy, is doing a fantastic job of trying to thwart the gangs coming from places in Dublin down the motorways and targeting rural areas, but he needs personnel. The ten extra gardaí that are coming in October are simply not enough. The people living in towns and villages in Meath, Tipperary or Sligo where Garda stations are not reopening will feel angry at this morning's proceedings not knowing why their Garda stations remained closed while Stepaside and others are reopened. What would the acting Garda Commissioner say to those people who will read the report or listen to this? I believe the acting Garda Commissioner made that commitment in July in good faith. What has really changed since then not to permit this to come into the public domain?