Paschal Donohoe (Fine Gael)

Other colleagues have called for a debate on the escalation of crime and the Garda response to it. I support those calls. The response we frequently hear from the Government is that the necessary funding is in place and the needs of the Garda are being met to enable it provide an adequate and sufficient response to deal with this issue. However, a report published today from a body set up to examine the level of funding for the Garda shows this is not the case. Two significant points are made in the report. The first is that by August of this year the Garda budget for funding overtime requests will be exhausted and the second is that the current capital funding is not in place to provide new stations and expand current facilities to cope with the increase in the number of gardaí that will graduate from Templemore. It is imperative that we debate this. The point is consistently made that the Garda have the necessary resources to cope with the issues we face, yet an outside body, led by non-Garda personnel, states this is not the case. Mountjoy Garda station in my constituency has been threatened with closure and I want to know why this is happening and if resources are a factor.

I reinforce other calls for a debate on our economy and add another facet to those requests. The one area of our economy that has been performing very well in the past year has been the services sector, which has held up the competitiveness of the country. The share of trade that sector has in the world began to decline in recent weeks. At a recent conference organised on the future of the docklands and the IFSC a large number of speakers from international companies pointed to the extraordinary success of our financial services sector but also to how easy it is for that template to be copied and how many other countries are engaged in doing that. I call for a debate with the new Minister for Finance on the future of the financial services sector and for the Government to recognise the scale of the problem we face. I am concerned it does not recognise that. It needs to ensure the necessary plans are put in place to deal with it.