Niall Ó Donnghaile (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I have two final questions. The first is very succinct and it is to ask if the Commissioner is familiar with the operation of the mobile property register operated by the police in Britain and whether he would consider such a scheme in this State. Finally, there is quite a bit of detail in the following. It is to ask the Commission about the arrest figures for Operation Thor. These figures were obtained by my colleague, Deputy Ó Laoghaire, from the Minister for Justice and Equality and they are extraordinarily high. I will give the Commissioner some of them as they appear before me in a reply from the Minister very recently. It states that under Operation Thor, there were 10,024 arrests between 2 November 2015 and 7 May 2019. This represents an average of eight arrests every day over the past three and a half years, or one arrest every three hours. I am sure Deputy Munster would like to see similar statistics for her own constituency. There have also been 11,554 charges brought under the operation to date for a range of offences including burglary, handling of stolen property, possession of firearms and drug offences. According to Garda statistics, there have been 34,461 searches, 96,997 intelligence reports and over 356,000 patrols over the same period. Garda figures further show that there have been almost 300,000 checkpoints since the operation started, which is an average of approximately 158 every day. What is the Commissioner's view on that? The figures as quoted in the reply seem extraordinarily high.