Cecilia Keaveney (Fianna Fail)

I welcome the Minister of State, Deputy Killeen. I am disappointed that the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform, Deputy Brian Lenihan, or the Minister of State at the Department of Finance with special responsibility for the OPW, Deputy Noel Ahern, is not present but Deputy Killeen is a good and capable substitute.

I wish to highlight the need for a 24-hour Garda station for north Inishowen. As some might know, Inishowen is part of County Donegal but many people from the region believe it to be the 33rd county. It is the size of Louth and has the population of Leitrim and is therefore a sizeable entity. It is mostly surrounded by water and is practically bordered by Northern Ireland on two sides.

There is a Garda station in Buncrana under construction, which I welcome. It is part of an overall development project for the town worth €21 million. The Garda station is being constructed with the decentralised and consolidated offices of the Department of Social and Family Affairs.

If there is only one 24-hour Garda station in one part of the peninsula, one must travel a substantial distance to service the rest of it. I won the argument in favour of having a second. Progress was made and I was led to believe we would secure a site for it. It may well have been acquired by now. Some months ago, I was led to believe that the Carndonagh project would proceed along with that in Buncrana. It is from this perspective that I ask whether the Carndonagh project is close to proceeding to construction. In many respects, the construction of the station in Buncrana had many false starts but I am glad to say the work has started.

We need the new Garda station because there has been a high level of deaths on our roads. This has lowered on foot of the presence of the Garda traffic corps. The Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform should note that people appreciate the presence of the corps and would like it to continue to focus on the locations most prone to accidents and also on the times at which they occur. The people who are of most danger to themselves and other road users are always the target and are not in any sense the soft targets or fish in the barrel that we often hear about.

I do not attribute the deaths on the roads to boy racing because the two issues are not always linked, as everybody knows. However, noisy exhausts are a problem in the town centres. People want gardaí to be visible to address this. Where there is only one 24-hour station, there is a perception — regardless of whether it is true — that there is a very small number of gardaí on duty in an area with a very scattered population. In Dublin 30,000 people would inhabit an area less than 1 square mile but, in Inishowen, they would inhabit an area stretching from Newtowncunningham to Malin Head, which is probably a distance of 50 miles, or from Desertegney over the Greencastle and Shrove. If there is as problem in one area while there is only one Garda car available, one can imagine how adequately served the population feels.

I appreciate it was accepted there was a need for the north Inishowen 24-hour Garda station. I do not know if the Minister of State has details of personnel deployment in the station. Residents from places such as Clonmany were worried that there was a lot of delinquent-type activity in the town. There was a particularly bad phase although there are good and bad phases. The main problems in my town of Moville and in Carndonagh are petty vandalism and noisy behaviour at anti-social hours.

Much of County Donegal is bordered by the Six Counties and the large population base of Derry. As a result, it is not the quiet backwater people would like to believe it is. When it comes to money for roads, etc., people see County Donegal as separate from the counties surrounding it. The fact the counties surrounding it are in a different jurisdiction does not mean the people are different. There is much movement across the Border.

I welcome the construction of the station in Buncrana and the fact we have a paddywagon. We want greater Garda visibility and more closed circuit television systems to assist gardaí. There has been quite a turnover of senior Garda personnel in the Inishowen area and I refer, in particular, to superintendents. While every superintendent had merits, at one stage we had five in six years. I come from a teaching background and if a school had that type of turnover of principals, one can imagine what would happen.

I do not want to go into the controversies surrounding the Garda in County Donegal but there is a need for the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform and the Minister to restore confidence in the force, to support the building of team spirit, to ensure sergeants do not rotate as quickly as it sometimes appears and to encourage superintendents to stay in the area and build up a rapport with the people and their staff so that the community initiatives which are needed, such as mini-policing forums, evolve.

As I said, much of the county is bordered by the Six Counties. Many of the Border villages have become unrecognisable. We are not what many people in Dublin believe. We are quite a vibrant little community which is undergoing change. That is very much due to the fact Border villages have turned into quite large towns virtually overnight.

I look forward to hearing the Minister of State's response, particularly in regard to north Inishowen and the facility at Carndonagh.