Jimmy Harte (Labour) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State to the House. I am sorry that the Minister of State for Arts, Heritage and Gaeltacht Affairs, Deputy McGinley has left because he is a fellow Donegal man and would have shared my concern about the recent spate of burglaries in Donegal and their fall-out. I am from the rural part of the county and now live in an urban part, Letterkenny. Donegal, like many other counties has rural and urban divides with different policing issues pertaining to each area. Community policing did not start in Ireland nor did it start recently. It has been going on for many years and probably came out of America and developed in the UK when the race riots flared up in the early 1980s. The British police had to look at themselves and ask why there were being targeted by the community they were there to protect. They had to embrace a community policing policy which this country has adapted and is developing as it goes along. Statistics show that Ireland is like New Zealand, in having a similar population and rural-urban divide but we have 600 stations whereas in New Zealand there are 400. We have 13,000 officers as against 8,700 in New Zealand which has embraced community policing. In the UK, apart from Scotland, there are 1,400 stations. We have just under half that number although the population of the UK is 15 times ours. Community policing is very important and it will develop. It is not a question of having more Garda stations in an area. My father-in-law, God rest him, was a garda who lived in the station and my wife was born there, as were all of her brothers and sisters. As she says that was in the old days when most of the stations in Ireland were occupied by a garda and his family. We have moved on from that. It may be that in tourist areas a Garda station is open for the month of August, for tourists but not for the remaining 11 months. The community would have to prove that the numbers stacked up to have it open for 12 months.

We must review the role of community policing in Ireland and embrace it, not run it down. I am reluctant to point at Sinn Féin but it has embraced community policing to such an extent in Northern Ireland that it is enthusiastically closing the rural stations there. In one instance, Bushmills, which is a rural area much like rural Donegal, Cavan or Mayo, when the locals tried to keep the police station open Sinn Féin refused to support them.