Cathal Crowe (Clare, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to speak on this. I am sharing time and will use three minutes, if that is okay. I have long represented the issue of suspended gardaí here in this Chamber. At the moment, a total of 112 gardaí are suspended. Some are suspended for very good reason and some may have done things that merit being kicked out of the force. However, many of them are suspended unnecessarily for very simple things like squaring road traffic fines. Imagine if some of those could be brought back into the force to fulfil the front-line service of An Garda Síochána. The number suspended at the moment equates to approximately half of the total Garda force in my own Garda division in County Clare. That helps to quantify the issue. Many of them are at home and being paid to fulfil this role. It is unheard of.

As Deputy Coppinger leaves the Chamber, I will make the point that she misrepresented how this part of our work functions. This is a statements session. She said that only three Government Members bothered to show up. She is now leaving when I am speaking. She should not misrepresent how statements work for the sake of a social media clip. Off she goes into the sunshine.

The new policing structures overly concentrate activities on Dublin to the detriment of counties like Clare. I will not name the date but there was one evening in the past month when there was only one garda covering the entirety of west Clare up to the Galway border. To look at the fleet of vehicles, when An Garda Síochána Headquarters in the Phoenix Park buys new vehicles, they are nearly always concentrated in the city divisions. In a rural county like mine, some Garda fleet vehicles are ten or 12 years old. I have put down parliamentary questions to ascertain their service records and some of those vehicles have been off the road for six or seven weeks of the previous year because of malfunctions and not being up to date.

I will mention the programme for Government because it proposes to reintroduce electronic tagging. This was a suggestion I made in my own party. It is a no-brainer. The legislation for that passed in 2009. If our prison system cannot accommodate prisoners, at the very least, they should be shackled to an electronic tagging system at home so An Garda Síochána can know where they are. I have a few seconds left.

The Garda eyesight check needs to be changed. While the fitness test standard for An Garda Síochána was lowered in the past 12 months to allow a greater age cohort to get in, the eye examination standard has increased, which is not fair.

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