Mr. Mark Toland:

In my experience, and I think the situation is the same in Ireland, it is much harder to get people in cities to engage in neighbourhood watch and community alert schemes. I live in rural Ireland and local people are much better known to each other and there is more of a community spirit. The Garda Síochána has struggled to introduce neighbourhood watch schemes in high crime areas and to get local people involved in these schemes.

We did not find a disconnect between community gardaí in Dublin and Cork city in comparison with gardaí in rural Ireland. We found it very interesting that the community gardaí were valued in both areas. What we found was that when people were told to ring their local garda station by community gardaí, they did not always get the most appropriate response and sometimes they felt their call was not welcomed when they rang up to support something. That is a problem when people contact or ring a Garda station to report something such as anti-social behaviour or a quality of life issue. We found that gardaí in the cities are much busier and they struggle, because of the volume of calls, to deal with quality of life issues whereas gardaí in more rural areas have more time to deal with those issues.