Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Thursday, 21 March 2024
Public Accounts Committee
Appropriation Accounts 2022
Vote 20 - An Garda Síochána
9:30 am
Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Social Democrats)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source
I will put it in context. If the Commissioner were to look at policing levels, for example, in County Meath, where the Minister for Justice is located, and the resources there and the average resources nationally, tongue in cheek, if the resources in Meath were to be deployed elsewhere, he could cut the police force in half. That is the level of cover. Population does not seem to matter. The big growth areas have been Fingal, counties Meath and Kildare, and south Dublin. That is the arc of growth, yet there is no matching correlation with the deployment of additional resources with that. Is that because an inadequate number of people are coming out of Templemore? Is that the only place the Garda gets the resources from? If that is the case, how does it ever catch up in areas like that?