Joe O'Toole (Independent)

I strongly support Senator Hayes. The issue I intended to raise ties in with his comments. The Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform should concentrate on crime rather than telling us about half a dozen hardworking gardaí and prison officers who are earning excessive overtime. He may be right, but it involves six people and it is distracting attention from the real issues. Let us not worry about people who are working too hard. Let us worry instead about the job that they are trying to do and how difficult it is to do it. On one side of the crime debate are the issues raised by Senator Hayes while, on the other, are the gardaí and the prison officers. While it may be true that matters among them need attention, that is the minor end of the debate. The real issue is that people are living in fear not just of crime, but also of co-operating with gardaí and others in solving crime. We need to support those law-abiding people in communities.

One of the problems that always arises in these situations is that when people talk about an area which experiences a great deal of crime, everybody in that area appears to be a criminal. Finglas, which I pass through every morning as I live only a few miles from it, is a community of law-abiding, decent, hard-working people who are as committed to having a crime free area as anybody else. The people in those areas are as much victims as those in other areas and we need to keep that in mind. Any debate on crime should not be simply on the law and order aspect but also on the issues that give rise to it. I ask the Leader to give serious thought to the proposal that we examine crime and the causes of crime.