Aodhán Ó Ríordáin (Dublin Bay North, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister. We had a good engagement with the Garda Commissioner and his officials and we hope to have a good engagement with her as well. Similar to others, I want to talk about morale in An Garda Síochána. Does the Minister feel there is a morale problem? According to the statistics, in 2013, there were 26 resignations from An Garda Síochána; in 2018, the number was 77; but up to September of this year, there were 114 resignations. I understand that number has increased since we had the Garda representative associations before us recently. Is that not a clear indication of a serious morale issue within an Garda Síochána, that people just want to get out, notwithstanding what Deputy Daly said about people buying out their pensions? I ask the Minister to speak to the issue of morale.

The second issue relates to the number of people charged this year for the possession of drugs for their own personal use. I am going to keep raising this as long as I have breath in my body. The figure for 2023 is 6,396 but, in 2017, that number was 3,692. We have seen an almost doubling of the number of people who have been charged with possession of drugs for personal use, not for supply. The Garda Commissioner gives the impression that some of these people may be supplying drugs and that is the mechanism they use to carry them around so that they are under the threshold for what is considered to be personal use. However, if there is that number of people in the criminal justice system, is that not a complete and utter waste of everybody's time? Father Peter McVerry and others have spoken about young people who come before the courts for the possession of cannabis worth €2 getting criminal sanctions. Is it not time to radically overhaul that approach? Would Garda time not be better spent tackling the dealers and traders in the drugs industry rather than the people who clearly have addiction issues, who do not belong in a courtroom and who should not be interacting with gardaí or judges? They should be dealt with in a completely different way. We are led to believe by the Government that the system was effectively changed in 2017 but the statistics give a lie to that.

I ask the Minister to respond on the clear morale issue within An Garda Síochána, which is leading so many people to leave the force, and the issue of the mounting number of people who are getting charged for possession of drugs for their own personal use, which is clogging up the criminal justice system, wasting everybody's time and doing no good for people who actually have addiction issues.