Billy Timmins (Wicklow, Fine Gael)

If I may be so bold, I will give the Minister two items of advice. First, he referred to how easy it is for one to sound tough on crime when one should be tough on crime, an opinion I advocate. His predecessor is gone, but it is important to do the job instead of articulating on the airwaves what he will do.

Second, it is difficult to follow crime statistics. While there is an attempt to dumb them down — the Department's officials inserted in the Minister's speech facts about detections per head of population — it is important to have clear statistics on crime. We cannot deal with crime unless we know whether it is increasing or decreasing. No favours are done by dressing up the statistics or massaging them in a certain way.

I want to see the Minister do two things during his time in office. He should try to establish the link between disadvantaged education and crime, an issue I have been raising for ten years. One of the Minister's predecessors gave a commitment and some officials may have travelled to the United States to examine statistics on the link between educational disadvantage, including dyslexia and other literacy problems, and people who become involved in crime. At a juvenile delinquency centre in Britain, approximately 50% of the residents suffer from dyslexia whereas the normal percentage of the population is 4% to 8%. As inequality can be dealt with through early primary education, we should invest more resources in that area.

I welcome the Minister's announcement of a new centre for young offenders. The educational centre for young offenders at Mountjoy Prison completed in April 2003 was not manned or operated until April 2007. I do not know what has happened since, but I advise the Minister to examine the young offender centre at Thorn Cross outside Manchester. My visit before last Christmas was a fantastic experience where I spoke with the inmates and prison officers. The centre has a vocational education ethos. The young offenders spoke of how they write to their buddies in the bang-ups, as they call them, and advise them to attend Thorn Cross. They have good relationships with the prison officers, are placed in jobs in the community and are liaised with as time passes. For many young male offenders, the relationships they built with the prison officers were the first in which they had male role models. If the Minister cannot go, he should request some of his officials to visit Thorn Cross before he develops the new centre.

Very often, simple measures can address the antagonism people face, especially from anti-social behaviour. Anti-social behaviour comes in waves. Today the problem is graffiti and tomorrow it will be something else. One of the most significant problems currently involves boy racers in souped-up cars who bomb around towns and country roads at night. A simple measure which considers the insurance and tax implications of upgrading and modification of cars might reduce the incidence of this kind of behaviour.

According to legislation introduced by the last Dáil, control over setting out Garda divisions is outside the Minister's control. My home county of Wicklow is covered by three Garda divisions and it is virtually impossible to follow their boundaries. We are governed by Gorey, Dún Laoghaire and Carlow-Kildare and there is no centre in the county itself. While there cannot be a Garda division for every county, there should be definitive boundaries such as could be established by joining two counties together. When everybody is in charge, nobody is in charge. It is difficult for the public to establish which is their division. I acknowledge that the matter is one for the Garda Commissioner.

When the Commissioner comes to look at the above matter, the Minister might discuss with him the rebalancing of Garda deployment. For historical reasons, there are significant disparities in per capita deployment of gardaí among certain areas. It is important to address the matter. While I realise it would be difficult to reallocate, for example, 100 gardaí from the Cork to the Galway division, appropriate placement of recruits could resolve the problem over a short period.

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