Ciarán Cuffe (Dún Laoghaire, Green Party)

The issue is that the policing districts bear little relationship to local authority areas, Dáil constituencies, HSE health areas or postal districts. This makes it difficult to put a meaningful interpretation on statistics from the Garda Síochána. If the statistics are difficult to interpret, it will make for poor policing and poor analysis of data. Will the Minister bring his influence to bear to introduce co-ordination between the various offices of State that produce statistics in this regard? It is difficult enough to find one's way through the various definitions of crime, which seem not to have been updated for the past 100 years or so, but to use districts that bear no relation to the kinds of areas that the Central Statistics Office, the Health Service Executive, local authorities or other agencies use renders it a complete mess when one tries to put a meaningful construct on such data. Can the Minister use his influence to bring some meaningful co-ordination of the kinds of areas used by him and his colleagues at the Cabinet table?

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