Brian Hayes (Fine Gael)

I second the motion. I welcome the Minister to the House and thank him for attending the debate.

This morning I spoke to a constituent of mine who recently had to leave her local authority home in my constituency because of the torrent of abuse she had to face as a young mother over the past few months. I told her that I would hopefully have an opportunity to speak to the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform, and she asked me to put on the record her experience of the abuse she has suffered in her community and the reasons she had to leave her local authority home.

This woman is on her own with two children. She bettered herself by going to college and has provided a decent home and income for her family. However, she has had to leave her home in the past three weeks because of the sort of behaviour to which Senator Cummins referred. I said I would have an opportunity to speak to the Minister about what is going on in her community. The abuses include shouting, including verbal abuse on numerous occasions while her child was asleep; house burglary; personal items removed from her house; human excrement placed on her porch walls; junkie needles posted through the letter-box and thrown in the back garden while her children were playing; a child's bedroom and the mother's bedroom destroyed with blood; and the living-room and kitchen ransacked. All this was done by a small, targeted, well-organised group of thugs in her community. When a friend of hers who had a British-registered car called to see this woman, he suffered racist abuse, with the words "Brit scum, Brits out" written on his car. The paint work on his car was scraped and his tyres were deflated. Anti-social obscenities were uttered on several occasions. Street yobs were openly drinking in this woman's area. The Garda response was delayed, and assistance has not been obtained by the local authority.

I am not saying this is the experience of every person in similar circumstances in my community or countless other communities throughout the country, but it is typical of the kind of menace we face on an ongoing basis from anti-social activity. The bottom line is that matters are not improving but getting worse. The Minister might say that it is always the job of the Opposition to say that things are getting worse, while paradoxically, the Government will say things are getting better. However, the headline crime figures from my own district in the Tallaght area alone show that from 2000 to 2004, there has been a 300% rise in violent assaults. They are not my figures but those of the Minister. While he might argue that headline crime per head of the population is decreasing, that does not properly reflect the level of intimidation and violence faced daily by entire sections of our community.

I know the Minister wants to tackle the issue — no Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform would not want to tackle it — but I ask him to put all his efforts into this area because this is the aspect of crime which is hurting communities. The high-profile cases, the very serious crime we see reported daily on television, represent a reality with which the Minister and the Garda must deal but the anti-social menace people face is a much more real-life experience in terms of their homes and workplaces and we must counter it strongly.

I have appealed to the Minister on a number of occasions to please include a particular project in my own constituency as part and parcel of the Garda youth diversion project. I know that more money has been devoted to this latter project in recent years, but the stay-in-shcool project in St. Aengus's parish in my own area of Tallaght does exceptional work with about 50 youngsters. They might well be out on the tear and out of control were it not for this excellent programme which intervenes, encourages them and ensures that they have some educational opportunity. We are waiting for the Minister's Department to include this project as part of the Garda youth diversion project. Though the Minister no doubt receives many such appeals, I ask him to again consider the application because I can give first-hand testament to the work which this community is doing through the stay-in-school project.

There are some issues which we need to address. Senator Cummins is right to say we need more Garda visibility. That may well require a rostering change in terms of the availability of gardaí on the ground. My own area, Tallaght, has the same population as Limerick city, which has four Garda stations compared to one in Tallaght, and twice as many gardaí. There is no proper proportioning of the available resources within communities, particularly those affected by crime.

Community policing is one of the most important aspects of policing, yet too often where a member of the force is placed in a community, taps into it, recognises the hassle points in it and understands the troublemakers he or she is hived off into another aspect of policing within two years or even 18 months. Community policing must be at the heart of policing work in terms of engaging with communities.

Another issue which should be addressed is repair orders. I am aware of many private individuals whose houses and gardens are in a poor state of repair. Local authorities should have the power to tell those individuals that they must clean up or improve those dwellings or they will be fined. The problem is that youngsters hang out in these places because they are in a state of disrepair. Local authorities should be able to impose an immediate sanction on any private individual who does not keep a house and garden in good repair to ensure these places do not become hang outs for people who wish to cause trouble.

Restorative justice is important. Great strides have been made in other EU countries in implementing restorative justice. Nobody is talking about putting children behind bars. That will only lead to a revolving door syndrome in terms of those children acquiring knowledge of more heinous crime through the prison system, although there are cases where a child must be taken into custody as a means of protecting him or her, the family or the community.

We need to develop restorative justice in this country. The victims of crime want to see an effort made by the perpetrator to give something back, to commit to society and to show that he or she is wrong. The problem is that so many of these out of control youngsters are so brazen in their attitude. They laugh at the gardaí and at their parents, who might be doing their best to bring them up well. They laugh at authority in general. We must encourage the principle of restorative justice if we are serious about this problem.

Finally, I reiterate a point I made on Committee Stage of the Garda Síochána Bill, that a radical Garda recruitment programme is required in the most disadvantaged communities in this city. There are 7,000 local authority houses in my constituency. Not one person from those houses has joined the Garda in recent years. The best way to change the attitude between the community and the Garda is through a radical programme of recruitment in the communities worst affected by crime. The Patton principle should be extended to recruitment procedures in the Republic. Where a community is disengaged from gardaí and feels no sense of loyalty to them, vigilantism and the threat of paramilitarism will fill the void.

A radical programme of recruitment in these communities could be implemented by stipulating that 10% or 15% of all new recruits should come from disadvantaged communities. That would help to break the bad attitude that often exists between such communities and the Garda.

This motion is composed of suggestions from Fine Gael and the Labour Party. More must be done to tackle this problem.