Mattie McGrath (Tipperary, Independent) | Oireachtas source

That is a shocking reply. The Minister for Justice needs to take heed. She is accountable to this House. I am sick and tired of Ministers coming in here to refer to the Garda Commissioner, head of the HSE and all these people. They are not elected or accountable to the people. We are supposed to have a Government here. We are celebrating 100 years of our freedom, having set up our Republic. The response is shocking. The Minister for Education can read out all the figures she likes. What about retirements? What about people who are out sick? What about people on other duties? These are masked by the figures. Court duty takes up an enormous amount of time. The Judiciary here must be tackled as well. It should not be tackled, as such, but the laws must be changed so they will not be so lenient. The revolving door must stop and tagging should be introduced immediately. The public must be reassured that the Garda has the resources. It does not have them, despite the figures about lay people being appointed and all the rest of it. We have good lay staff in Clonmel and good reserve gardaí serving Clonmel and Carrick-on-Suir. We have good community police in Sergeant O'Regan, Sergeant Denis Ryan, Fiona, Clare and Diarmuid but they have not enough given the size of Clonmel and Carrick-on-Suir. We are talking about a community of 30,000-plus. Calls are going unanswered and are not being logged. A person told me this evening he got the first Garda victims-of-crime report after having made about 20 phone calls. It was the first one he got this week. Therefore, it is quite clear that the figures are being manicured and distorted to give a different situation. The Minister needs to cop on to that, deal with it and not hide behind this charade. Garda members are unable to deal with the phone calls. Somebody has to man the station all the time and then deal with calls. There are people waiting two, three or four hours, or maybe no one turns up. That is not the fault of the gardaí; it is the fault of the system. I am holding the Commissioner to account. He is entitled to protect his members and the citizens of this country. For the Minister for Education to read out waffle from the Minister for Justice of the kind she read out is simply unforgivable. It is despicable and disgraceful. I do not have words in my vocabulary to describe how bad it is. It is time we copped on, cut out the dead wood, dealt honestly with the hard-working people and protected them.

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