Ms Margaret Tumelty:

I will just echo what the Deputy said about the experience of policing during Covid for an awful lot of communities. We talk about Garda visibility; they talked about Garda presence. Very often, having large numbers of gardaí does not actually guarantee a sense of presence of gardaí in one's community. I remember one conversation in an inner-city area outside of Dublin. The person talked about how the Garda station was within 100 yards but many of the gardaí had never come into their community unless it was for enforcement reasons. The person said that to have the gardaí interacting with them on a positive basis was a very new thing and something they relished. There is also the tone of policing. We heard phrases such as "Community policing got back to where it should have been". The operating model will be important in that regard and for the community hubs. The community policing framework is being rolled out at the moment. Our emphasis in overseeing that is that it cannot be just an allocation-of-numbers job; it must be asked whether presence is being delivered for communities.

As for drugs, we have heard very strongly from communities that they know that work is going on where there are large hauls of cash, guns and drugs but that this is not impacting their existence from Monday to Friday or from Monday to Sunday in their communities. This year the Garda located drugs policing not in the section of the plan that typically deals with organised crime but in the community. It is interesting that this can be seen as a small administrative thing or something that actually has meaning. We have had a great deal of engagement with the Garda Commissioner and his team over the years on the need for the drugs policing side to look at the impact on communities. We were hearing very strongly that, in respect of the type of policing, the emphasis on guns and tonnes, which is a phrase we have heard, was not necessarily delivering impact for people in terms of their fears about drugs and intimidation of their kids. We heard from those communities that what we need is good, solid community policing, that gardaí need to be in the community, not just for enforcement, and that they are needed to develop relationships with the young people.

To come to Deputy Burke's point about multi-agency work, that affects not only drugs policing but also elder care. What has come across strongly from our talking to the organisations that work with the elderly is that the gardaí are very often the first people to encounter the vulnerability and have the job of trying to discern where there is risk but that, after that point, there needs to be that multi-agency working and that safeguarding in respect of elderly abuse. During Covid, we heard of people signing over permission to their relatives to collect their pensions. Was that ever signed back? Where was the safeguarding in that regard? The Garda cannot do everything. That is where the multi-agency competence and capability have to come in. The community safety partnerships offer a way of doing that, but it is also a matter of that development of multi-agency working at a local level.