Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour) | Oireachtas source

Like others, I welcome the opportunity to speak on matters of community safety and crime prevention. I must say, however, that I would prefer to be dealing with concrete proposals and legislation rather than making statements. We have spent six hours today speaking on general statements. This is a Legislature that is meant not only to identify problems but to put forward concrete solutions. One of Government's prime responsibilities is to ensure the safety of its citizens. People must not only be safe but they must feel safe and not threatened in their homes.

The security of everybody in their homes is so fundamental and it is so undermining to their well-being and mental health if they feel under threat. Crime has a devastating impact on victims. A crime such as burglary is a violation of the family home, which goes well beyond the mere loss of property. People often feel unsafe forever more after such a crime.

As a society, we provide protection through effective policing and we have had much debate in the last decade in this Chamber on effective policing and on how to go about it. We have tried different initiatives. I have argued for a long time for an independent policing authority, a Garda ombudsman and so on and eventually versions of that were put in place. More recently, a comprehensive Commission on the Future of Policing in Ireland was established and its recommendations are being put in place. I do not accept all of its recommendations. The Minister knows I have clearly voiced my great fear of bringing the appointment of senior police officers back into the hands of the Garda itself, for example. That was taken out to be an independent decision and it would be a big mistake to reverse that. Much more needs to be done to provide a 21st century model of policing. There is a blueprint out there for how to do that. One of the things we need to do is to have effective policing specialties across the State and to have adequate resourcing for them.

Like others, I want to deal with the menace of drugs, which is devastating communities. It is not only devastating urban communities but rural communities as well. There is not a community or a village in Ireland that is free from the negative impact of drugs. Our policies to date are not working. Many people, including the Minister, have talked about a multi-agency approach and that is required. I welcome the acknowledgement of that but that means the agencies on the ground that will be involved having the resources and the capacity required. That will often mean the agencies working with youth. The agencies involved in community building are the agencies that are deprived of the resources to do that. That would be a mistake. It involves looking at housing and planning and at how we plan our communities. These are critical aspects of proper policing and people being safe. Rat runs through housing estates and dark and unlit spaces where people congregate can often be scenes for drug trafficking.

Members, including the Minister, have talked about youth diversion. We need youth diversion schemes and properly resourced education schemes. If one looks at the overall map of where the drug problem is greatest - and it is bad everywhere - it is often in the areas of the greatest deprivation. Deprivation cannot be disassociated from the issue of drug problems as people in desperate straits often reach out to drugs as a solution. The Minister mentioned having social workers involved but what quite often happens is that young and enthusiastic social workers are working at the coalface in difficult areas but then they get burned out and leave. We need to incentivise social workers to stay in some of the most challenging environments. A premium should be paid to social workers to continue that so they can get on with the work.

I listened with care to the quite incisive comments of Deputy Bruton earlier and he speaks with some authority about his area. Many of the suggestions he has made are important ones that should be acted upon. The horror of the involvement of more children in the drugs industry is a scandal that we need to address. I suggest, as has been suggested on more than one occasion in the past, that we need a statutory offence of grooming young people into crime. As penalties for drug possession and trafficking have increased due to decisions of this House and the other House, the way that drug lords get around that is often to recruit very young children in the expectation that they will not face serious penalties. That awfulness in grooming young people in that way has to be tackled and the way to do that is to make a statutory offence of grooming young people and to have an exemplary sentence for that offence.

One of the most effective things we have done in recent decades on crime has been the establishment of the Criminal Assets Bureau. That was an initiative of former Deputy Ruairí Quinn when he was Minister for Finance in the aftermath of the awful murder of Veronica Guerin. It is the most effective tool we have used to date and quite often it is the only effective tool we have in dismantling criminal gangs. We need to have that bureau strengthened and localised to take away the assets and the ill-gotten gains of those who keep themselves at arm's length from the commission of crimes and are hard to get at. If they are deprived of the wherewithal to enjoy their ill-gotten gains, that can be effective in dismantling these criminal gangs.

Another issue that is important to look at in all of this is that of bail and of bail supervision. We have to have adequate resources to monitor and assist offenders who are granted bail by the courts. We must give them the wherewithal and support they need to avoid reoffending because too often it is a revolving door in that people commit crimes, come out on bail and commit more crimes when they are on bail. Without being too specific, in my constituency there is one individual who is a personal crime wave every time he is out of prison and that is shocking. We need to ensure we can deal with people and support them back into a more productive future for themselves because nobody wants criminality as a way of life. People want other options and as a society we need to provide those options.

I also want to cover domestic violence. It is often a hidden aspect of crime in our communities but its impact is devastating. Covid-19 has provided a blanket to hide the increased incidence of domestic violence. We saw the figures at the end of last month with the Garda reporting an 18% increase in calls for help relating to domestic violence. Thankfully, there has also been a significant increase of nearly 15% in the detection of offences, particularly of breaches of court orders under the Domestic Violence Acts. I welcome the roll-out of the particular supports across every Garda area and it is something we still have to see the full extent of. When, in the hopeful aftermath of this awful pandemic, we get back to some degree of normality, we will be shocked by the degree of domestic violence that will be uncovered so we have to act now. I welcome initiatives such as Operation Faoiseamh, which is being effective and I commend the proactive nature of Garda intervention that we have seen. I commend all the work of An Garda Síochána, which has been so supportive of communities in this extraordinarily difficult time.

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