Mr. Drew Harris:

We get a lot of requests about stations, presence and visibility. We have thought about this, and while it may not work in rural areas, certainly in larger residential and suburban areas and in cities, we may be able to use empty shop units as Garda posts. My colleagues have been very innovative in many respects, creating a presence in An Post offices when elderly people are collecting their pensions, for example. They have also been using local halls and other spaces to create a clinic-type facility. There is a lot of that going on. People take a lot of comfort from the presence of a Garda station, but to get real comfort from a station, we need to staff it and patrol out of it. If we want to create a greater presence, there are other things we might want to consider doing to make sure that we are available to talk to people.