Mr. Pat Leahy:

There is not a whole lot to add. The Deputy is referring to section 12, where a garda is empowered to act if a child is at risk. He is right that Dr. Shannon, when he came in, said that gardaí acted very professionally in this role. Much of that came from on-the-job training and experience that people picked up along the way from other members. With regard to full-on training, gardaí would have been trained on the Act itself and understanding what it meant, but with regard getting into the mindset and going in to do an evaluation in a home situation to determine whether a person is at risk, much of that over the years has been based on a member’s perceptions and what he or she feels, sees and picks up in the environment he or she is in. Dr. Shannon found that we applied that very well and in a very sensitive way.

Mr. Todd is right that for every issue or incident that arises for policing there is a call for additional training. The spectrum is jammed full at the moment, both here and, as Mr. Todd describes, in the North. The bottom line is that for everything one trains for, something else falls off the far side, as it were. One can only take on so many of the roles that other agencies are more experienced at. Mr. Todd is right when he says that when we get into that space, we start creating a risk for ourselves and for others in many cases. We are changing the nature of the game in policing ourselves, and as I went through the list of training for community gardaí and what they will be exposed to, they are taking training on trauma, mental health and such areas that would not have been on the floor, so to speak, for policing. It would have been a traditional approach to policing. The environment has changed quite considerably for us and training will change accordingly.

Going back to how it should be addressed, the joint agency response to crime is the way forward. Mr. Todd hinted at it with regard to the PSNI, where we are operating with other agencies that have the capacity and expertise to deliver services that we cannot instead of training police to do it. When we talk about the joint agency response to crime, we are talking about having appropriate agencies working together to provide unified, integrated services to people whom it is not appropriate for police to service on their own. That will require some significant changes because the Deputy is right that, in certain circumstances, some agencies work from Monday to Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and I have worked at the coalface in and around Pearse Street and Store Street for many years, as a sergeant, inspector, superintendent and chief superintendent, where people present themselves at all hours of the day and night over the weekends. We try to operate the out-of-hours system and we have children and young people looking for a place to stay, but it ends up at a garda's front door. We need to move out of that system when addressing that type of issue. This is a constant situation for policing across Ireland, Northern Ireland and the UK in general. We are all dealing with the same issues.