Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour)

It is quite clear that one would not find anybody cruder and rougher on all these matters than the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform. One would not have to go further than the Tánaiste to find out just how crude and rough the man can be on these matters.

As I said, public safety is an important issue. There is a growing feeling of vulnerability and insecurity across the country. My constituency is not particularly lawless but in the last few weeks I have been called to meetings in Wexford, Enniscorthy and Bunclody to discuss that issue. Therefore, urban and rural areas are experiencing pressures and vulnerability. We would do a grave injustice to people's sense of hurt to treat this matter with anything less than full seriousness. One must respond when a rural community like Bunclody musters a packed house to express to public representatives, including myself, and senior Garda officers, its great sense of vulnerability due to the number of break-ins in the area.

Last Thursday, the assistant Garda commissioner in charge of the south-east division was asked to attend a meeting in Enniscorthy with the elected representatives of the Wexford constituency and the local town council because of the vulnerability people feel on the streets of that town. I know from discussions on my local radio station that similar feelings are held in my home town of Wexford following a number of break-ins in settled housing estates there. These are real issues and while there may not be a complete solution to them, one can certainly have more effective policing. With that in mind, the Labour Party last week produced an updated, comprehensive set of proposals to deal with effective policing for the 21st century. Ireland is now very different from the country whose legislation shaped An Garda Síochána in 1928. We are no longer a rural, homogenous society. We have greater wealth, mobility and social interaction than ever before. The structure of An Garda Síochána should be based on the needs of a different Ireland in the 21st century. The most important component to make policing effective is to have police in, and of, the community. The police must be known to, and knowing of, the community. We do not have that now so it needs to be done, although it is not a simple matter.

For years, lip service has been paid to the notion of community gardaí. There are about 400 in the country but none of them has any long-term requirement to remain in and know the community, nor do most of them see a career path in being involved in community policing. If we continue on the path of separating policing from the community we will never solve the issue of increasing criminality. Our police force is structured like a fire brigade — it reacts to crime. It calls in the expertise and visits the burgled house or the assaulted individual. We must change the mind-set of policing so that it is part of the community rather than being a response to communal problems. Community policing should be active, knowing the pressure points and being alert to strangers and ne'er do wells. It would nip problems in the bud, providing a trusted ear for the community for sharing intelligence and knowledge. In many ways, that sounds like an old-fashioned idea but it is a fundamental one. Ironically, it is the idea at the heart of the most comprehensive analysis of policing in a developed western country, namely, the Patten report's proposals. Those proposals set out to put community policing at the core of every police station and every police officer's job.

We do not value or reward community policing. I suggest that in order to get people to commit themselves to a long-term career path in community policing we must value it which, in our system, means providing monetary rewards. For that reason, we suggested the creation of a new rank of community garda. The idea would be to refocus the work of every garda to be a focused part of their own community.

In a policy document published six years ago, I proposed a structure that was rejected out of hand by the then Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform, Deputy O'Donoghue. Belatedly, some sections of that document have now been implemented. What I described six years ago as local policing liaison committees were modelled on my experiences in the Department of the Environment. Under the programme entitled Better Local Government, I established the idea of strategic policy committees, bringing together community and elected councillors to focus on issues. In that way, one could have joined-up thinking that was not exclusive to councillors, so that people who were knowledgeable about the community would have direct policy inputs. Apparently, those policing liaison committees are going to happen six years on. They are a feature of the Garda Síochána Act but will be called joint policing committees. I welcome the fact that they will be piloted in a number of local authority areas in the coming months. I hope we will have not only local policing committees but also the public policing fora that were envisaged in those proposals, whereby the community at large would be able to tailor its policing needs. Each community is unique and different. The policing needs of rural Bunclody are different from those of Wexford town, and far different from inner city Dublin or suburban Limerick. We need to be alert to specific pressure points in communities and policing plans must be flexible enough to cater for such requirements on a long-term basis.

The notion that one can have strategic national plans becomes farcical when one considers some of the Garda Síochána's plans. One such plan aims to increase explosive detections by 3% but it is meaningless to set such a target. Policing is not about setting targets. That is the mistake made in the United Kingdom, namely, that it is all about ticking boxes. When the PULSE system can measure one district against another, it will be seen that detection rates in one area are lower than in another area, so gardaí must gather a few speeders so their records are as good as those in the other area. That does not amount to good policing. We must change our mindset on these matters.

The Bill is well motivated and well intentioned. It seeks to address the real and genuine concern of people throughout the country who feel vulnerable. If the Minister is in any way complacent or frivolous about the genuine sense of fear, he should look no further than the CSO figures published today, which give comfort to nobody. Detection rates last year for crimes such as murder, fraud, burglary and sexual offences were 35.4% down on the last recorded rates. However, 54 murders were recorded last year, which is of particular concern and indicates the cheapening of life throughout the country. The most worrying statistic is that there were 75 murders with guns between 1998 and 2004 but proceedings were initiated in just 26 cases, or 35%, and convictions were recorded in just 12 cases, or 16%.

We must come to terms with these issues because they feed not only into the perception but the reality of fear. The Bill is an effort to do something in this regard. In as much as the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform is prescient, I do not subscribe to the analysis that the Bill is a solution. There is a hierarchy of rights in which the most fundamental right is the right to one's bodily integrity and well-being. In the Constitution and natural law, that right is superior to the protection of property. That does not mean a person does not have the right to protect his home, property and family, he certainly does, but under current law, if an individual was to be prosecuted for defending his home, property or family, or his life, the onus is on the prosecution to prove that the individual committed a criminal offence, and there are wide defences available to an individual in this regard. That is why we do not often have prosecutions on the sort of issue that is at the core of the Bill.

We need further debate on these matters. We need to have joined-up thinking on providing a reconnection between community and policing so that communities are properly policed and secure, with a visible police force. That would allay many of the fears that cause the elderly, the vulnerable and those living alone throughout this land to be fearful. It is a state of affairs we all have a responsibility to address.

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