Billy Kelleher (Cork North Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I, too, wish to express my deepest sympathies to the family of Detective Garda Adrian Donohoe and to the members of the Garda Síochána throughout the country.

It is hard to believe that we are standing here discussing this issue in view of what the Minister said on this side of the House over many years about Garda recruitment, the need to have gardaí living in communities and the need to expand Garda stations as opposed to what we are now seeing, which is the systematic dismantling of Garda stations.

My concern is that it is now obvious that the Minister does not understand what policing is about because when he was on this side of the House he was very forceful in the idea of having integration and community-based policing whereby the community and the Garda Síochána worked as one. He said on many occasions that rural stations and small sub-stations throughout the country were an integral part of that. We now find that under the policing plan announced by the Minister he is systematically dismantling and undermining all that has been achieved in recent years in trying to develop a cohesive Garda Síochána that is represented in every community.

There is a very strong attachment between the people and the uniform that has served this country so well for many years. We now have a situation where the Minister is absolving himself and pointing the finger at Garda management. The fact is that the Minister is ultimately responsible. He is the one who signs off the policing plan and he is the one who argues either effectively, or in this case ineffectively, at Cabinet to deliver resources for policing in this country. It is clear that the decisions he has made are completely opposite to what he espoused for many years when he was on this side of the House and in the Fine Gael manifesto with regard to Garda numbers, police stations and community policing. That has now been stripped bare by the decisions the Minister is making.

I attended a meeting last week in Rathduff about the station closure there and there is huge concern about that. The people of Rathduff and Grenagh are rational. They listened to the members of the Garda Síochána management who outlined what would be in their area but people need reassurance and the greatest reassurance they can have is knowing there is a Garda station and a uniformed presence in their community. That is the critically important factor. These stations have served communities for many years and they have become an embodiment of those communities.

We saw statistics with regard to Grenagh and Rathduff being one of the safest areas in which to live in terms of the number of burglaries, aggravated assaults and all the other crimes. Those show emphatically that a Garda station located in a community acts as a deterrent but, more important, it gives comfort and peace of mind to the many people living in that community that in the event of something happening there can be a rapid response.

More important, it acts as a deterrent in the first place. The evidence the Minister presents that these closures will not have an impact on response times, community policing and the correlation between a Garda presence and crime prevention does not stack up. When he was on this side of the House, he argued the exact opposite. At this stage, the Minister should rescind his decision and start a consultation process. In fact, he should start a consultation process with his own backbenchers, first because, to a man and to a woman, they are lining up at public meetings condemning the closure of Garda stations.

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