Seán Canney (Galway East, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am grateful for the opportunity to speak on the Bill. I come from a rural constituency and while we do not experience much antisocial behaviour, we do experience antisocial activity such as dumping on private roads and on bogs. There is a bog beside my home that we spent last summer cleaning up. The clean-up cost the community approximately €5,000 and the council approximately €18,000. We have it secured now and it is right but we could not get anybody for the littering because we could not find the name of anybody on any bag and could not use CCTV footage given it would breach data protection rules.

In the same way, we have had a spate of robberies in rural houses in my area in north Galway over the past number of months. Data protection is of no comfort to the people in these houses when they return from a walk or a trip to the shop to find that their house has been ransacked and their goods stolen. They feel powerless. Gardaí are trying to detect those involved but they do not have the tools that are necessary in this age to tackle these crimes. The criminals themselves have moved on and their technology has improved enormously. Gardaí need to have the support of the public, which they do, and of whatever technology they can get. We can get caught up with issues of privacy, data protection and all of that but it would be great if the registration number of a car coming off the motorway, going into a rural area and coming back out a few hours later, could be recorded. That is an important tool of detection for gardaí.

The body cameras that gardaí will get are a necessary defence for them. Gardaí are human beings; they are members of families and communities and we must have more respect for them. Most people have respect for them but it is beginning to slip away a little bit. There are some who will challenge anybody in a uniform just because they feel he or she represents the establishment. In that context, it is important that we give gardaí as much protection as possible. This is related to the attractiveness of being a garda. It is important that we reassure young people who want to join An Garda Síochána and their parents, who might be worried about them joining, that they will be properly equipped to protect themselves and to detect crime.

It is important that we provide the tools necessary for the detection and conviction of criminals but also that we provide the basis for the prevention of further crime. If crime pays, it will continue but if crime is detected and people are punished for it, that is the best statement we can make. People say that our jails are overcrowded, there is no room and there is a revolving door, and that is true. However if we find people who are robbing houses and farms, taking stock and farm implements and selling them on, there must be a serious penalty for them. If they are on social welfare, for example, their payments should be stopped immediately. The only effective way to treat people who are robbers is to hit them in their pocket. That is very important. I might be a bit hard on the criminals but I know people who have been robbed in their houses and two years later, they are still coming to terms with it. They feel that their house has been desecrated. They do not feel comfortable in the homes that they might have spent the past 40 years living in and raising their families in.

We have to be on the side of the people who are being robbed. We also have to be on the side of the communities involved in community alert schemes and those who are working to try to help one another. We have to make sure that the laws are there to back up law-abiding people and to deal with the criminals. I will support the Bill because it is important. The training of staff and the retention of data is important. The equipment must be workable at all times, unlike in the past when CCTV cameras were erected in the middle of towns but there was nobody monitoring them. I have seen this so many times. Cameras were put up in playgrounds but no monitoring station was attached to them. Something was put some place, it was locked up and never seen again after that. It is important that whatever we do into the future, we do it in a way that is effective. We must buy the equipment, install it and make sure it is maintained, policed and used for its intended purpose. That is very important as well.

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