Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

I have been a regular reader of policing plans over many years. Part of the reason I have been interested in them is that I have looked at the distribution of resources, which of course is the responsibility of the Garda Commissioner. If you do not have a sufficient number of gardaí, you get a reactive type of policing. It has a real impact. There are particular types of crimes that do not show up if road checks and things like that are not being done. I was looking at the ingredients of the policing plans over the years. I looked at them before and after the most recent census of population. We have just taken a new census of population. I do an update every couple of years on the distribution of resources. I raised this with the Garda Commissioner last week. The same pattern keeps on cropping up and has cropped up for the past 15 years, and that is only since I have been looking at this. The pattern is that the areas that are growing rapidly in population consistently have a lower ratio of gardaí to population. It is important then to factor in things such as the reliability of data because population will not be the only metric. There will be crime statistics, but can you rely on the crime statistics? Then the Garda is not detecting some crimes, so the crime statistics are lower than they would otherwise be and you are almost at a kind of revolving disadvantage. Does the Policing Authority address that resourcing issue, or can it address it, with the Garda? Does the authority look at the policing plans? The quality of the public experience was mentioned. The quality of that experience relies on visibility as well as everything else. Having a sufficient number of gardaí is important, but gardaí also have to be safe in their workplace rather than going out to do their jobs on their own as opposed to in pairs. There is the reactive element, safety and so on, but what does the Policing Authority do in interrogating those policing plans in respect of the distribution of gardaí?