Jim O'Keeffe (Cork South West, Fine Gael)

Deputy Costello is right. The facts speak for themselves. Taking retirements into account, since 2002, the Government has put only an average of 81 extra gardaí per year on the streets. That is roughly three for every county. That is a disgrace. That is the only way to classify that deployment.

It does not take a rocket scientist to understand that we can have all the law we want, but without the gardaí to enforce it, we will never have any order. The number of assaults causing harm hovers at around 4,000 a year. There are 54,000 public order offences. The same complaint is heard again and again — where are the gardaí on the beat when they are needed? Why, on a Saturday night in Dublin city, is Garda visibility so low? Faced with that appalling vista perhaps the Minister's role in this whole sorry mess is slightly easier to understand. Having failed to put gardaí on the streets, to tackle violent disorder and to deliver on many of his promises, which turned out to be empty, he decided to divert national attention away from his record in office. Instead of allowing the focus to centre on his appalling record, as usual, he went for the headlines. Café bars were a convenient headline and, he thought, a convenient cover. He thought wrong.

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