Brian Stanley (Laois-Offaly, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank Mr. Harris. On the e-scooters, I have the answer here to the relevant part of it. I am not going to read the whole thing but the second paragraph says that regulations for e-scooters are now expected to be in place by quarter 1 of 2024. I do not know if any of the Deputies have any information on that. Deputy McAuliffe seems to think that it may be in place but it says, "E-scooters will not be legal to use in public places until that time". That would tell me that it includes roads and footpaths but as I said earlier on, people are using them to get to work on cycle lanes and so on. Legislation is expected but with regard to footpaths, if that letter could be sent out to Garda divisions it would be good.

On the Garda Reserve, the provision for the Garda Reserve was €1.395 million, and the outturn was €126,000. When I am going through some of the research and the backup information that was provided for us today, I look at what is happening here. We have a situation, which has been well outlined both here and in other forums, regarding low Garda numbers but here we have a situation where less than one tenth of the budget was spent on the Garda Reserve. It is a low budget to start with, less than €1.4 million. What is happening there? It says that one explanation for this is that recruitment targets are a problem. Is there an effort being made to try to bring people into it? Is it that the allowances are not sufficient to bring people into it? What is happening with the Garda Reserve, in short? It was hailed at the time as being a support for regular gardaí, and that they would be out on patrol with regular gardaí. Given that we are in the middle of a staffing crisis, or certainly a staffing shortage, why have we only spent less than one tenth of the budget? It was only €126,000 in 2022, out of a provision of €1.4 million.