Jim O'Callaghan (Dublin Bay South, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The State is improving in terms of how it deals with people who report sexual offences. Many people who report them are very satisfied with the response they get from An Garda Síochána. However, the point I was making was slightly different. For instance, on knife crime, we know that some 2,000 knives were seized in 2018, compared with 1,600 in 2017, but we do not know the extent to which knives are used in crimes or criminal activity. We need to try to identify how we want to expand the role of the CSO and formulate our statistical procurement process in order that we can get more useful information. We will again find ourselves in a situation where there will be another increase, possibly in sexual offences. At some stage, we will have to identify the reason for this. Unfortunately, we are operating in a vacuum at present as we do not know whether more people are becoming confident about reporting or there is a serious rise in the number of incidents.

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