Mr. Drew Harris:

Some areas are certainly under strain. We have repopulated stations as our numbers have increased and we have recruited Garda staff, who have displaced Garda members into operational front-line roles. All those displacements have been to build up, in effect, divisional policing, that is, uniform policing. Moreover, stations that may have been open only once or twice a week have had a member or maybe two members assigned to them. All of that is positive. We still have growth yet to come of some 700 to 800 members, and that is positive as well. The number of Garda staff we employ should free up more Garda members for front-line duties but that will include staffing the national units as well.

There is always more demand than we can meet. There is a lot of demand for visibility of policing but we also have a lot of demand for less visible policing, whether relating to cybercrime, economic crime or the protective services.