Michael McDowell (Independent)
Link to this: Individually | In context

I welcome the Commissioner and his colleagues. I thank him for his service to the State since 2018. It is very much appreciated by those who have experience of these matters for a long time. I compliment him on his dedication to law enforcement north and south of the Border for so long.

We live in a strange world when in 2007, the same year the people of Dublin South-East dispensed with my services, the total number of gardaí, including student gardaí, was 14,258 and it is now 14,221. By 2013, the number of Garda reservists was 1,164 and there are now only 204. I will make a point about visibility, as Senator Gallagher did. Visibility is all-important. The Garda Reserve idea has huge potential for the visibility of policing throughout the country, if it is taken seriously. I know there was a financial meltdown, Covid and all sorts of things. The Department of Finance as it then was, and then the Department of public expenditure and reform, did their level best to stop any recruitment of gardaí in the intervening years. We are only now achieving where we were in 2012 and, in many respects, are behind it. The recruitment promises made by successive Governments have to be delivered on. I will not ask the witnesses to be controversial and agree with that proposition but I am saying, particularly in relation to the Garda Reserve, it is a squandered opportunity. The fact that it is at a fifth of its former level is a sad reflection on the failure to make Irish policing local, connected with the community and visible.

Having said those things, I will ask one more question related to Deputy Kelly's point. Am I to understand from the answers given today that in the case of Evan Fitzgerald, the firearms with which he was found in possession and prosecuted for possession of, were the subject of a controlled delivery by members of An Garda Síochána prior to that? Did members of An Garda Síochána meet him prior to arranging the controlled delivery? I suggest they should have been aware whether he was or was not a vulnerable person, as we are now told by the media he was. Is that a fair understanding? I do not want to go into the people against whom charges are still outstanding, but in relation to Evan Fitzgerald, is that the bottom line of what Deputy Kelly asked and got answered?