John Kelly (Labour) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister to the House again. The Garda Síochána has and always had my full support. However, as we speak, it is a force that is disillusioned and semi-demoralised, mainly with the direction the force is going. I would have to agree with the suggestion of Senators Landy and Whelan that it might have been a mistake to close down the Garda stations before first putting in place the new fleet of cars the Minister has purchased, and letting people know we had them, perhaps by advertising this on television and explaining how many cars would be in circulation in each county. This would have served to allay the fears of elderly people.

A similar mistake was made in regard to the closing of the accident and emergency unit in Roscommon Hospital, where the HSE promised the unit would not be closed until after it proved to the people over a number of months how the advanced paramedics were going to work in the locality, in order that their fears would be allayed. It did not do that and, again, it put the fear of God into people. Lessons should be learned from some of these issues.

There are also concerns within the Garda in regard to the new rostering arrangements. I see this in my own home town of Ballaghaderreen.

The station there is not the headquarters. The headquarters are in Castlerea, but the staff at Ballaghaderreen are being told to go up to Castlerea every night in their cars. Yet the crime figures for my area are greater than those for Castlerea. They are no sooner up in Castlerea than they are sent back down to Ballaghaderreen again. As was already mentioned, it is important that we do everything to make sure we do not end up with a blue flu epidemic again. I agree with calls for us to consider reopening Templemore in the very near future. We cannot let a situation arise in which the force gets demoralised, members take early retirement and we are left with a two-year period in which numbers of gardaí on the ground are low.

Senator Darragh O'Brien mentioned burglaries earlier, and said it had been mentioned at a joint policing committee that the Department was looking for more lenient sentences for burglars. That, coupled with an advertisement that the Garda stations are closing, is not a good recipe when one puts the two together. It needs to be hit somehow on the head. Senator MacSharry made a point I was going to make. I know we are supposedly putting more police cars on the streets. Given the introduction of mobile phones and the fact that gangs are coming down from other parts of the country with between one and three cars, they will always be ahead of us unless we address it in a different way.

Senator Daly said that the previous Government could not be blamed, that the Government could do business its own way and that the troika did not demand that we do this. Fianna Fáil signed up to this in 2010 with the troika, yet it now says there were other ways it could have been done. I ask Senator Daly and Senator Ó Domhnaill, who made a similar point, to tell us what the other ways are. What other way was the previous Government going to propose if it had not agreed with the troika? Had it another plan, and if so, why did it not use it?