Thomas Gould (Cork North Central, Sinn Fein)
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I will touch on the attitude of senior management within An Garda Síochána, the lack of community gardaí and the lack of resources the Garda have. Is the reason the Garda does not want to go and change the status quo because it knows it does not have the resources to work a new system? At the moment there is a system that most people would acknowledge is broken. Why would the senior management in An Garda Síochána advocate a system that the majority of people believe does not work?

I am from Cork. If one walks around Cork, Dublin or Limerick, or any of the big cities, one can see that gardaí do not have the resources. That all goes back to the austerity years of 2007 when the college in Templemore was closed and Garda numbers were slashed. Now we are trying to get Garda numbers up but cannot because of retirements and people opting for different careers. I believe that Garda management does not have the resources in terms of staff or financially to support a new model of policing if there was a new drug strategy. This is why, I believe, they are slow to change.

We were talking about similar incidents. I said that we need a whole-of-government approach but it might be a whole-of-society approach. I know a lady with four children who was refused social housing because she had a conviction for having cannabis for personal use. The question then is: how can having a tiny amount of cannabis prevent her and her four children from being housed? Whether it is the HSE, the Department of Justice, the courts system or the Garda, the strategy would have to go right across all the systems.

Reference has already been made to the Garda and how it wants the status quo to stay. Why is that?