Mr. Eoin Buckley:

I thank Deputy Costello. The question was around the culture of impunity and examples of it on the ground. Unfortunately I am aware of this from first-hand experience. I am from the Dooradoyle estate on the south side of Limerick City. It is a small housing estate of about 160 houses. Most of the residents, including my own parents, are living there for 50 plus years. Unfortunately it suffers from rampant illegal parking and footpath parking. This is primarily due to traffic accessing St. Paul's National School and University Hospital Limerick which are both in close proximity. Effectively what happens is that for an hour in the morning and for an hour in the evening the residents of that estate are largely under house arrest, or that is how they feel. This has led to a serious decrease in the quality of life for those people. They cannot access any of the amenities they need to access by car during those hours. If they choose to walk they must run a gauntlet of cars parked on the footpath and blocking driveways, and it is hugely disruptive. They have petitioned An Garda Síochána on numerous occasions to ticket the offenders and that has been done. Unfortunately it gets watered down over time and the offenders return. The residents acknowledge the resource limitations of An Garda Síochána. They have also tried to engage themselves with some of the offenders only to be met with apathy, false promises and occasionally aggressive behaviour. It is a problem that seems to be worsening.

One of the solutions that we have come here today to propose seems very appropriate for Dooradoyle estate, which is a zero-tolerance zone where periodically a member of the community policing unit would go in and issue tickets and penalty points. This would prevent recurrence as people would not be able to build up penalty points over time. The safety and well-being benefits for the residents of Dooradoyle estate would be huge. If this proves successful it could be a model that could be rolled out to many other affected communities in the country.