Mary Lou McDonald (Dublin Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The Government says it is listening to people. Maybe listen to this, because here is reality from Dublin. By the way, to people who are not from Dublin, I know this experience is about more than the city, but these events happened here, so let me start here. On any given day, you can walk from Heuston Station, you can come along the quays, you can go onto O’Connell Bridge and up onto Nassau Street, and you will not see a garda. When you turn the corner and come to this place, I bet you it is the first time you will see a uniformed garda. Equally, you can walk up O’Connell Street up to Parnell Square itself and double back onto Moore Street, go onto Mary Street and what you will see is antisocial behaviour, open drug dealing - on the hour; it is timetabled - open drug-taking, nuisance drinking, gangs hanging around, and a feeling of real menace and fear. That is not a unique event; that is every single day in the north inner city.

Do not tell me about everything you have done. You mentioned two Garda stations. For people who do not know, and some of us do, Fitzgibbon Street is not a new Garda station. Ha-ha, you closed it for more than a decade. The Garda station on O’Connell Street is desperate, with some unfortunate usually there on their own. You could literally be about to breathe your last breath out on the street and that unfortunate cannot leave the desk. Do not come in here and play a game of make-believe. All I have heard from you is fig leaf and an exercise of the most brazen arse-covering I have ever heard in this Chamber. Children got stabbed outside their school. I never thought those words would come from my lips, that that would be possible in our city, but it happened. Not alone that, the children in the community are doubly traumatised by this marauding mob rioting in our city. Control of the city centre was lost for two hours. That is what happened. I want to know what is your real response to that. What we witnessed, make no mistake, was a political failure and a wholesale abject failure in leadership. That is what is missing. I am not trying to score any points here.

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