Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

The objectives of the Policing, Security and Community Safety Bill seem fairly laudable. The main purposes of the Bill are, as set out in the explanatory memorandum, to "recognise the prevention of harm to individuals, particularly those who are vulnerable or at risk, as an explicit objective of An Garda Síochána; provide a new coherent governance and oversight framework for policing that will strengthen both the internal management of An Garda Síochána and independent external oversight supporting clear and effective accountability; make community safety a whole of government responsibility by ... placing an obligation on Departments of State and other public service bodies to cooperate with each other in relation to improving community safety".

They are fine objectives. They may not be so easy to achieve but they are certainly good. If we are going to achieve them, the last couple are probably the most important. There are many things gardaí have to deal with, which often put them in situations of jeopardy, horrendous situations such as we saw in Ballyfermot recently and, even more appallingly and without any justification or rationale, what happened in Omagh. There are circumstances that put gardaí in jeopardy and consume much of their energy and resources, which they should not have to deal with. If we understand that all of government has a responsibility for creating the conditions where those things can happen, where public servants like gardaí or others find themselves in difficulty, sometimes in jeopardy or at the wrong end of unjustified abuse, then we need to take that notion seriously.

One issue central to that is the question of how we deal with drugs. It seems that the entire strategy that has been pursued for decades has failed abysmally. The Garda, communities and society generally end up picking up the pieces for that, with ever-worsening criminality and violence and young people being drawn into a world of underground criminal violence, with all the horrible impacts that has on the young people themselves, communities and, indeed, the gardaí who are fighting what is frankly a losing and unwinnable battle. It is long past time, for the sake of gardaí, communities, young people and society in general, that we recognised that the approach we have taken to this issue has failed and we need a fundamental rethink.

I strongly urge the Government to learn a lesson that society should have learned after the disaster of prohibition in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s. Whatever one may think about alcohol consumption, whether good, bad or indifferent, it was an utter disaster. It criminalised, at a stroke, two thirds of the American population. By definition, the criminalisation of something that half or two thirds of the population does makes half or two thirds of the population criminals at a stroke. Everybody who took a drink was a criminal. Everybody who produced alcohol was a criminal. They had to be because state laws said they were criminals. There had to be a criminal underground and once there was a criminal underground, there could not be regulation or oversight. Criminality, violence and the dark underworld that goes with all that became an immediate racing certainty. It is exactly the same with the approach of criminalising drug use. That is not to advocate for drug use or to make any comment about it but to state that it is a fact that it is not going away and that it is about time that governments woke up and recognised that fact.

Does anybody seriously believe that drug use will stop? If they do, they are entertaining a dangerous fantasy. It will not stop. If we think about alcohol consumption or cigarette consumption, any impact on those has been made through public health education and, arguably, although I do not agree with this, through pricing policy, which the Minister would probably have put more store in. It is certain, when we consider all the health damage that smoking does and the damage that alcohol does, including domestic violence, antisocial behaviour, issues the Garda has to deal with and the damage to individuals themselves, I do not think any serious person is contemplating prohibition as a response. It is long past time that we took the same view about illicit drugs because I think it is a war that cannot be won. At a stroke, it criminalises huge numbers of young people. It draws them into, and even adds an attractive mystique to, the underground world of criminality. We need to de-romanticise it by decriminalising it, bringing what it is into the open and educating people about the dangers and realities of it, and so on, so that we can have an adult conversation about these things.

Without being simplistic about it, because it is a complex problem with many complex issues tied into it, I believe we are going nowhere with the issues the Garda has to face, issues of community safety and so on, while we continue down the road we are on. It is obvious that the situation is getting dangerously worse. I do not want to dwell on this point too much, other than to say that it has been noted in communities around Dublin that some of the people behaving pretty shockingly towards immigrants and refugees have been tied into some of that stuff in an alarming way. That is a really dark and sinister development.

We urgently need to grow up and treat this matter in an adult way rather than driving it underground and simplifying it by saying there are criminals in some places. People are not born as criminals. They do not come out of their mothers' wombs as criminals. Situations, circumstances and Government policies ultimately produce those sorts of distortions, criminality, violence and antisocial behaviour. There are many other issues, including housing, lack of services, the alienation of young people and communities. To my mind, it would be the beginning of wisdom to move on from a failed policy and start to treat these things as health and societal issues and use the best tools, education and reaching out to the young people involved, if we are going to solve those problems. That is joined-up thinking. It would be doing the Garda, society, young people and neglected communities a favour so that we can start to focus on the things people really need.

I have spent a long time speaking on this but I feel strongly about it. I hope and believe, going by past experience, that the citizens' assembly will take these matters seriously. In some ways, the Government does not need to wait because, to me, the argument is a slam dunk. The beginning of wisdom is to say that the current strategy has failed and is failing in a dangerous and disastrous way. That is the first point I wanted to make.

I also want to make a point about housing, especially where people, kids in particular, are living in appalling housing conditions and uncertainty with the threat of being evicted, or they are living in homeless accommodation. I cite a particular case very often that is particularly poignant to me of a woman who says that, while not in danger of criminality, her teenage child's mental health is deteriorating week on week because she has been living with that child for four years in one room in homeless accommodation because they are over the threshold. Does the Minister know what her job is? Ironically, she works for Tusla looking after vulnerable children. Her child is a vulnerable child, let down by the State and living in emergency accommodation for four years. It is shocking. She is a very conscientious mother and I am sure she will do her absolute best to protect her child, but if we do that to a lot of children, do we expect good results? Do we expect anything other than things will go wrong for some of those kids, that their attitude towards authority, towards the system and towards the State may not be the best if they are treated like that? That is just one example but we need to think seriously about it.

Even the Ukrainian refugees are now being left on the streets. Despite all the declarations of solidarity with the people of Ukraine, we now have dozens of Ukrainian refugees, who are fleeing war, being put out on the streets of Dublin. That is another issue for the police to deal with. We solve these problems by basic things like housing, equal access to education, equal access to health, giving people a decent start and not putting obstacles in the way of some that are not put in the way of others. If the Minister wants to garner a certain loyalty to society, that is how he will do it, and if he does, he will save the Garda and communities a lot of trouble.

One of the problems for the Garda is that if it does not do those things, it ends up in a confrontational situation with communities rather than assisting them. Through no fault of its own, the Garda ends up in a confrontational situation, and that produces its own problems. We witnessed one example of this at the demonstration on Saturday where activists, who had helped build a demonstration against racism and against the lies of the far right and who were handing out leaflets arguing against racism and for solidarity with refugees, were harassed by gardaí and had their leaflets taken from them. What sort of waste of Garda resources and time and energy is that? If we are talking about governance structures and Garda Síochána Ombudsman Commission, GSOC, governance and so on, it will be interesting, given we have lodged a complaint with GSOC and written to the Garda Commissioner, to see the progress of that, how it all works at first hand and whether what the Minister is proposing here will improve all of that.

Certainly, looking at the George Nkencho case, it does not bode terribly well. It is now two years since George Nkencho was shot and we still do not have the GSOC review that was promised. This was an horrendous situation where a young man with mental health issues was shot and we still do not have the GSOC review, thereby producing suspicion on the part of his family that there are other motivations, that he is being treated differently because he was black and so on. I do not know if any of those things are true, but his family deserve justice and truth and they have not got it to the extent that, as I understand it, they have had to take legal proceedings against the Garda Commissioner. That is not necessary if, first, bad things do not happen because we do not have that confrontational situation between the Garda and the community and, second, we actually have structures that allow the processing of complaints without any prejudice and where there is a genuine determination, if you like, to get to truth and to justice.

I want to use my last few minutes to give a particular shout-out for the civilian staff in the Garda who have made their views very clear, and the Minister should be in no doubt about this. The 3,000 civilian staff in the Garda, who are also members of the Fórsa trade union, do not want to be re-categorised as public servants from being civil servants. They have said, by a margin of 98%, that they want to remain civil servants. They did not join the Civil Service to be permanently part of An Garda Síochána. They get deployed to An Garda Síochána, but as civil servants they also have the right to seek transfers elsewhere, and many of them do want to go elsewhere. Everybody else in the Civil Service has the right to move around different Departments, and these staff are a different category within An Garda Síochána. They are not sworn members; they are civil servants. They have a different relationship, if you like, with the State and with the community than the sworn members of An Garda Síochána and they do not want that to change. The Minister should respect that.

One of the points the staff representatives make is that, rightly or wrongly, gardaí may end up in confrontation with trade union members in situations of industrial action and, as Fórsa members, the staff do not want to be in that situation. As civilian members of the Civil Service they wish to have the right to strike, to support our fellow trade unionists if there is industrial action, and not to be put in a situation where they are in any way in a confrontational situation with other trade union members and with other workers. They are absolutely right to wish that and assert that and the Minister should respect it.

The Fórsa representatives say there was no serious consultation with them and certainly there was no acknowledgement of the concerns they raised. They believe the re-categorisation from being civil servants to being public servants will be seriously deleterious to the conditions of employment of staff and possibly to their pay, and in the long term they do not want that and that is perfectly okay. They want the distinction between sworn members of An Garda Síochána, if you like, the front-line Garda Síochána, and the Civil Service role they play to be maintained. There is absolutely no difficulty with that and the Minister should respect them, engage with them and accede to their wishes and concerns in this regard. They point out that with the provisions of GSOC investigations and so on, they as civil servants are already subject to very significant oversight and investigation for doing things wrong. They can lose their jobs, be dismissed and so on and so forth. They do not feel it is right or necessary for them to be subject to some new regime when they are fundamentally a different type of employee from front-line gardaí. That is absolutely reasonable, so I hope the Minister will listen to their pleas. I am sure he has heard them and I am sure he has read their concerns. They are very clear in what they want and do not want. It seems to me unnecessary, and an amendment of section 54, I think, should be made to take on board their concerns.

Very lastly and with the slight indulgence of the Minister and the Chair, I will mention another group of Fórsa workers who are not a million miles away, namely, the service officers in the Houses of the Oireachtas. I am not quite sure who is their boss but I will say it anyway. They have very low levels of basic pay and they do not get much in the way of allowances for the often very significant additional hours they have to put in providing a service to Members in various respects. I believe there are ongoing negotiations about all of that but they are not very happy with what has been offered to them. I ask the Minister and the Government or whoever is up there deciding these things to engage in a more proactive way with the service officers and try to listen to their concerns in terms of the improved pay and conditions they are seeking.

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