Donnchadh Ó Laoghaire (Cork South Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

This Bill is about the restructuring of divisions and districts, a lot of which flows from the Commission on the Future of Policing in Ireland. While I did not agree with all of the commission's recommendations, by and large the thrust of what was put forward made an awful lot of sense in the context of the reorientation towards community policing. I have previously paid tribute to the fact that when resources were very tight, there was a great effort to try to protect community policing in the Cork city division and in the county. One of the points made to me during the course of some of the promotions to community policing in recent times, as the force as a whole has maybe become more reoriented in that direction, is that where somebody is appointed as a community garda the are typically promoted from the core units. While we have seen additional community gardaí and sergeants appointed, in Cork city and elsewhere, the positions of those gardaí who had been promoted have been left absent and those positions have not been back filled. Consider what this has meant for a standard Garda station. As we have seen, the dynamic in nearly every Garda division is that the staff complement in divisional headquarters has grown as community gardaí and the specialist units have increased, but a lot of the suburban and urban Garda stations have actually seen a decrease in staffing in recent times. This needs to be addressed.

In the little time that I have, I want to flag for the Minister, Deputy Humphreys, an aspect that we need to be very watchful for over the coming time. Some rapidly growing urban areas that not so long ago might have been small villages or towns but have seen rapid growth, are very often profoundly under-resourced in Garda numbers because the town or the suburb has changed so radically in ten, 15 or 20 years. That is something we need of which we need to be aware. There were incidents before in Douglas and Ballincollig, but I want to flag in particular the case of Carrigaline. Within living memory there were fewer than 1,000 people in Carrigaline and now there are almost 20,000 people, which is up by some 8,000 people in the past six or seven years. This presents a number of issues. The Garda station is rarely open. Even when the station is in use, there is an issue in relation to the fact that it does not have a computer-aided dispatch, CAD, system. When a garda in Carrigaline reports an incident over the telephone, he or she must then ring it into the district headquarters. It is absurd for a town of that size to not have a Garda station that is properly equipped. I would say that this situation is replicated in a number of other cases. The station has fewer gardaí than it had a year ago. It also does not have a prisoner transport. These issues are replicated across similar Garda stations. I urge the Minister to consider the thematic issue that we need to monitor places that are growing rapidly, where garda numbers are not keeping pace with that, and where the number of incidents in those locations are not keeping pace with that. When the Garda College in Templemore was closed, a period of time was lost. We are now plugging gaps, usually where demand is greatest, but sometimes this misses places that have experienced rapid growth.

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