Mr. Nick Glynn:

To be honest, I do not have a lot of experience of the Garda but I do of the metropolitan police in the UK . I have said before that they are addicted to stop and search. There is a challenge there, yes, and a cultural shift is needed. The work I did in early 2012 and 2013 on policing in England and Wales showed a massive reduction in stop and search because of a political drive to say these powers are intrusive and they can create and drive a wedge between young people and the future population and police authority. While some of those powers are still necessary, they should be used sparingly and they should only be used when necessary and there is a legal basis for doing so. The experience the Deputy just shared of being stopped and searched in his youth may be someone's first experience of policing and it should not be that way. If decriminalisation is to be the next step, then that is a transition the police need to buy into. One of the ways this can happen is for them to see the advantages of decriminalisation, giving them time and opportunity to focus on other things that are more important and that are closer to why they are there, which is the protection of life and property.

One of the stop and search powers in the UK is under question at the moment. It is section 60, which is a suspicionless stop and search power that has been massively abused and misused by the police. Scrutiny and oversight of these powers is really important. There is a challenge for policing to accept that they may not be able to stop everybody in the street when they want to because they do not have the legal power and right to do so. That is a difficult conundrum for them to accept sometimes.