Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

-----but it is in train. In respect of legislation, we would expect to have the public and community safety Bill next year, which will bring into law many of the recommendations made by Kathleen O'Toole in the commission she led on the reform of policing. It is being worked on at the moment by the Minister, Deputy Flanagan, and the Department of Justice and Equality. Ideally, I would like to have the heads of a Bill this year and the legislation published and enacted through the course of next year.

On the housing Bill the Deputy asked about, I do not have a timeline but will ask the Minister, Deputy Eoghan Murphy, to communicate with the Deputy and update him on it. I do not yet have the report from Mr. Justice Sheehan. I have not seen it. I know it is quite advanced and once I get it and have a chance to read it, I will bring it to Cabinet and publish it thereafter. As the Deputy will be aware, it is examining whether we should change our approach to dealing with drugs, moving away from one that is founded on criminal justice and enforcement to one that is more based on treating it as a health issue. I look forward to receiving that report once it is ready.

Our response to crime has to be twofold. As a former British Prime Minister once said, we need to be tough on crime and also tough on the causes of crime. We are tough on crime by increasing Garda resources. There are unprecedented resources now for the Garda and they are continuing to increase all the time. Additional gardaí were allocated to the Dublin stations quite recently, as the Deputy will know, reflecting the need for that to be done given the high levels of crime in Dublin. There has also been investment in ICT and equipment and vehicles, which will continue into next year and into the future. In terms of being tough on the causes of crime, that means tackling some of the underlying issues that cause people to choose a life of crime when others may not. Those are issues particularly related to social and educational disadvantage. We are doing that as well.

The north-east inner city initiative is a very good one. We have yet to see whether it has had good outcomes. What has been done has been very good. It is probably too early to judge whether the outcomes have been good because we cannot assess that at the moment. Unfortunately, as is often the case with a very targeted, very specific initiative, it would not be feasible to do that nationwide. We just would not have the capacity, the people, or the finances to do that in the ten or 20 other places that have been proposed, including places in my own constituency. Perhaps we can do something similar in those areas of deep disadvantage, including in the Deputy's constituency and in mine. We do have the community enhancement programme. One of the things we are examining is whether we should relaunch something similar to the revitalising areas through planning, investment and development, RAPID, programme which existed in the past, and identify ten or 20 areas of particular disadvantage around the country on an evidence basis and target them to do something similar to but not the same as the north-east inner city partnership.

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