Mr. Michael Sweeney:

I wish to pick up on a couple of issues. Reference was made to equipment theft. This is a very real issue in rural areas, not just for people in industry but for farms as well. There has been a substantive amount of it. It is especially targeted. Some of these individuals are able to case farms. There are quite detailed casings, sometimes with the use of high-technology equipment such as drones, etc. In areas where substantive work has been done on CCTV operations, on which I will elaborate later, there is a structure with which to trace the offences. However, that is in very rare situations. We are finding on the ground that where technology enhances security and observation, crime drops and moves to the next area and then to the next. This is a very real issue on the ground. It feeds into the fear referenced in our introduction and a sense of isolation. People live in fear, knowing that this is likely to affect them, if not now then at some time in the future. That fear often extends to not even reporting the crime when it occurs. We have to be very mindful of that. Much of the time the full impact and level of what happens on the ground is not reported. That affects the quality of the data we are reading.

I will give a brief example. I spoke to a man recently who had been sitting in his kitchen with his family, eating their evening meal, when individuals with dogs walked through their private yard and past their kitchen window, going for a walk through their farm. The family discussed whether or not to engage and decided not to. Not only that, they decided not to report it to the Garda. That is life in rural Ireland. We must be very conscious of what reality is like on the ground. There is fear of what may happen next if people report. From our perspective, the frightening part, into which we all have an input, is this: why is that individual not confident enough to report that to his local community or the Garda?