Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

Keeping people safe is one of the key functions of government. I characterise it as a critical civil liberty. Just saying the city is safe, as the Minister has done several times, does not mean it is. What was particularly shocking about the riot in Dublin was the lack of preparation for such an eventuality or, better still, a plan to prevent it from happening in the first place. On "Prime Time" on 28 November, Niall Hodgins of the GRA said there was no plan and that members turned up simply because WhatsApp messages were being passed from garda to garda. He said An Garda Síochána is a hierarchical organisation, yet no instruction came down to members.

Since the pandemic, it has been clear that there is alignment between different groups on social media. There are also international links between these groups and far-right groups, including UK white nationalist groups. These groups share recruitment methods and tactics for protests. It has been reported that the policing board raised concerns about the growing challenge posed by the far right in Ireland months ago. Earlier this year, the Garda Commissioner said the far right had failed to grow in Ireland, bucking a trend seen in other European countries. By 3 November, the Commissioner agreed to review the strategic guidance document on the policing of protests following a meeting with Fórsa, which had criticised the soft approach to policing the far right. In August, when four British tourists were set upon in Temple Bar, one of the four told The Journalthat passersby told him that attacks happened regularly in the area and that "the doctor said that these incidents happen a few times a week".

In August, the same publication examined the CSO statistics on recorded crime in the Dublin central north and south districts. The article quoted Deirdre Healy, director of the institute of criminology and criminal justice in UCD’s school of law, saying that assaults tend to go under-reported to gardaí relative to other types of crime. She said: “It can create an inaccurate measure of what’s actually happening”, adding that a CSO survey in 2019 found that only 29% of victims reported such incidents. She said that this dark figure of crime statistics had been a constant in the national records for a number of decades and that it usually results in around 70% of assaults not being reported.

The report, Travelling in a Woman's Shoes, was published last year. It found that slightly less than one quarter of Dublin women and 11% of women nationally had witnessed violent behaviour or sexual harassment happening to someone else on public transport, which is a critical area. The conclusion is that this is not rare.

What has the Minister for Justice done with the memo brought to Cabinet as early as July 2016? The memo provided for the expansion of the strength of An Garda Síochána to a total headcount of 21,000, with this to be composed of 15,000 gardaí, 2,000 reservists and 4,000 civilians. There are currently fewer than 13,000 gardaí, despite the population having grown significantly since then. Those numbers are needed if we are to have any hope of a proactive style of policing. Antoinette Cunningham of the AGSI recently criticised the model of policing in Ireland, claiming it was more focused on reactive policing than on preventative policing. If crimes are not prevented from happening, time is spent is spent investigating and prosecuting them. This has to be a watershed moment.

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