Lisa Chambers (Mayo, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

We know that the Minister's Government likes to hark back to 2010 and even further back. However, we need to deal with 2018 and current Government commitments. If the Minister says he has increased the Garda numbers in Mayo up to 328, that means an increase on last year of a grand total of 12 extra gardaí for the entire county. Last year, the figure for the traffic corps in Mayo was 11. To put that into perspective, in 2010 it was 27. Even if we take all of the brand new shiny 12 gardaí that the Minister has managed to give County Mayo this year and put them all into the traffic corps, we would still only be at 23. If we went back eight years we had 27. We are not actually getting to grips with the deficit in Garda numbers in Mayo. I appreciate that much of the focus of this Government appears to be more on the urban centres but rural crime, whether the Minister likes to accept it or not, is a massive issue. It is frightening people. They do not feel that they are properly protected because they know they do not have adequate numbers of gardaí. Will the Minister confirm how many gardaí went into the traffic corps and is he satisfied that an increase of 12 gardaí for a county the size of Mayo is sufficient to provide the policing that he has just articulated?

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