Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputy Gannon for highlighting what is an important issue to his community. More broadly, the issue of antisocial behaviour and feeling safe in one's community is one that applies to his constituency and to all our communities across the country. On Cabra specifically, I am pleased to confirm to the House that the Garda has informed me that additional gardaí have been allocated to Cabra recently and that it has the new Garda vehicle attached to Cabra Garda station. The Garda is telling me, and I appreciate that the Deputy has a much closer perspective on this than me, that the more proactive patrols are achieving an improvement in terms of a reduction in the number of public order offences and incidents, and I know it monitors that closely.

The Deputy is not wrong that it is about growing Garda numbers in general. I never like to pit specialist units against community gardaí because we need both, and the Deputy has not done that either. Specialist units in this capital city and in all of our communities, including emergency response units, drugs units and organised crime units, are playing a crucial role. We also want to see a growth in community policing. We want to see gardaí back out on the beat, walking the streets and knowing their communities. Under the new community policing model it is the intention for every community to know the name of their community garda and to have a contact number and email address for them. To do that we have to grow the Garda numbers. That is why we have given the Garda Commissioner and the Garda money to recruit 1,000 new gardaí this year. Around 350 gardaí retire from the force every year, on average, so that will enable us to see growth in overall Garda numbers during the course of the year. The Commissioner has said clearly that he wants 15,000 and more gardaí. That is where we want to get to.

We can get there and the Garda College is back open. I am not blaming Covid for everything because sometimes that can be too convenient an excuse but at the same time Covid did close the Garda College on a number of occasions and that definitely had an impact. The college is back open and a new class is due to go in during the coming weeks. Another class will go in roughly every ten weeks for the rest of this year. I hope these additions to Cabra will make a difference, I will feed back the Deputy's comments to the Garda authorities and I am happy to keep in touch on it.

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