Paul McAuliffe (Dublin North West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State’s comprehensive response to the issue I raised. It is fair to say that while the numbers are lower, the visibility of those incidents is much greater. We must ask ourselves why they are more visible during Covid time. With less international and national news, the stories of these individuals are coming to the fore, but in many ways those stories were there during busier news cycles. Those incidents are being told in Covid times.

It is really important that as life gets busier, we do not forget the victims of antisocial behaviour because when people experience it, in particular older people when they go outdoors, it shakes their confidence in their community, in their neighbours and in the people around them.

At a very low level it can be a gang of young people at a shop who intimidate them into going in. Often that is just about both groups understanding each other. That is not the antisocial behaviour I am talking about. I am talking about the kind of pernicious and destructive antisocial behaviour that can vary from open drug dealing to aggressive begging and all those other issues. We need to deal with the social problems behind these things but we also need to make sure the streets are safe. That is not a matter for this House. The matter for this House is the resourcing of the Garda. Ensuring our spaces are safe is an operational matter for the Garda. I know the Garda does everything it can but I urge it to pay particular attention to open spaces, our public realm and to ensuring people feel safe in what is a great city here in Dublin, as well as in other public spaces right across the country.

See this speech in context