Marc MacSharry (Sligo-Leitrim, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I am thankful for this opportunity and I thank the Rural Independent Group for using its time for this important issue. I join others in commending our gardaí in communities throughout the country on the hard work they do on their behalf. That said, through no fault of their own, we can provide a template such that they can be even more effective. Consecutive Governments over the years, not just the Minister of State's own but indeed those of our party, have undermined the viability of rural Ireland. This has increased the vulnerability of rural communities to be victims of crime. We have stripped out Garda stations - Fine Gael being responsible for 139 of them in 2012 and 2013 alone - and many post offices, which is still ongoing. This in turn has led to closures of other businesses and increased the vulnerability of villages that no longer support family businesses, and it is for city-based crime gangs to prey on these villages. This is something we need to reverse and look at closely when we look at the overheating nature of capacity here in Dublin city and in our other cities. We would do better to think a little more strategically about this.

Community policing is where all the success has been in larger urban areas of the future, but we have moved away from it in rural areas where, historically, in any rural area - Easky or Cliffony, County Sligo, for example - the local garda and the local sergeant lived in the community. This is now a rare occurrence. Normally, gardaí can now live 20, 30, 40 or 50 miles away. They do not have the level of local knowledge that their predecessors of some decades ago had. The gardaí of those days knew where every body was buried, where every stone was to be unturned and what was going on. We should, if necessary, incentivise local gardaí to live in rural communities. I appreciate that a guy from a particular street in the city cannot be a garda in that area, but it is something we could usefully look at.

Regarding not just bail but also reoffending, we have heard the statistics. In 2016, the rate of crimes committed by people on bail rose to 13%. We also have a huge number of reoffenders, whether in burglary, aggravated assault or drugs. Drugs are in every community in Ireland. It does not matter how rural they are, unfortunately. These are the issues. We need to look at our whole system of incarceration because, sadly, it is foundering in terms of its rehabilitative focus. Sadly, people in high percentages of cases are honing their skills while they are guests of the State, coming out to reoffend, perhaps learning an extra trick or two from colleagues in the prison system. We need to look at rehabilitation in order that we weed out the potential for reoccurrences.

My colleague, Deputy Aylward, has rightly pointed to CCTV. It is one thing to announce €1 million per year for a scheme, but if the scheme is unworkable and overly bureaucratic or we put so many obstacles in the way, as is the case, the money will not be spent. Of the €2 million allocated so far, only about €430,000 has been drawn down. Local authorities have to be data controllers. Local authorities such as Sligo, for example, do not have a red cent to support their normal services. Therefore, despite the fact that the communities may want the local authorities to expand to other areas, they cannot support the costs that are necessary to back up these applications and be the data controller. I ask that the network of community councils throughout the country be looked at as the applicant or the conduit for data controlling, which may help in this regard.

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