Michael McDowell (Dublin South East, Progressive Democrats)

I fully echo what Senator Jim Walsh has just said. I intend to fast-track the ethnic diversification of the Garda Síochána, since we know that in Britain youths from racial minorities in particular saw a police force in the 1950s and 1960s which did not reflect their community at all. It indelibly marked the relationship between those minority communities and the force. Now is the time for us to be thinking about this rather than struggling to deal with it when many of the toddlers in prams from minority ethnic communities are young teenagers who see no echo of their own background in the police force that serves their community. I am very anxious that we fast-track that process now.