Réada Cronin (Kildare North, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I take this opportunity to acknowledge the community gardaí in north Kildare for their magnificent work during the Covid crisis. Together with volunteers and community groups, they got the shopping done, prescriptions and meals delivered, and cups of teas offered and drunk in the garden. It was top-class community policing and social action, just as was seen when the local community garda was so helpful to us when we were setting up the Maynooth community first responders.

In many ways, our community gardaí are the first responders in society. I saw that at first hand growing up because my dad was a member of An Garda Síochána, rooted in his community. My mam used to say he should have been a social worker. In practice, he was a community garda before their time. Today is his anniversary and it seems apt, on the anniversary of his death, to honour and to seek to improve the tradition of community policing among the men and women of An Garda Síochána. I urge the Government to invest strongly and strategically in the kind of community service he believed in and practised in the job he loved. We need more community policing and we need more diversity in An Garda Síochána to reflect our diverse society. We need more gardaí working socially with communities rather than judicially about them.

Whether we like it or not, our prisons are primarily for our poor and our failed. Our jails are heaving with people who have been failed in an unequal social structure. Half of the people in our prisons dropped out of school before their junior certificate and more than a quarter never went to secondary school despite attendance being compulsory up to age of 16. Our community gardaí can and do step in early to work with families and community leaders to keep fragile kids steady. Sometimes they are the first authority figure to show a bit of faith in those who have a reputation for causing trouble when they are in fact just troubled. As a politician, I want to see more and deeper community policing in the less leafy suburbs in order that young lives can be transformed and saved. I want to see the community garda having time to kick a ball or to sit on a wall chatting to kids in the community. I say that because, for me, An Garda Síochána must always be about peace of mind and peace in the heart.

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