Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Independent)

My motivation for asking the question is that I could not find any statistics. I am not requesting that great effort be made in their compilation. I am being asked why the proportion of gardaí to the population in my area is so low compared to elsewhere in the country. Essentially the residents want to know how to influence this. They say they are satisfied when the gardaí respond to calls and they are not criticising gardaí of any rank.

The difficulty is that there are insufficient numbers of gardaí, particularly in rapidly developing areas. Residents in such areas have asked me whether they should report incidents to the local Garda station and whether this would affect the determination of the number of gardaí to be deployed in their area. Is this considered side by side with the increase in population, for example? When asked this by residents, I advised them to make complaints to the Garda so issues could be documented.

Weekend after weekend, I receive complaints that gardaí responding to calls cannot catch the perpetrators, in spite of doing the 100-yard dash after them into the woods or elsewhere. There is evidence of damage to bus shelters, telephone boxes and other public properties and there is a great sense of frustration. It is felt that the measurement of an area's needs is not determined by the critical mass of population but by how crimes are recorded or documented. Will the Minister enlighten me on how a complaint about a serious problem is recorded when a call out in respect thereof does not result in an arrest?

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