Jimmy Harte (Labour) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister. My wife was born in a Garda station, as were many of her siblings in Carrigart in Donegal. I must add that this was not because her mother was a criminal but because her father was a Garda. That was over 50 years ago. The Garda station was manned by a family, as were most stations in the country. The local Garda, God rest my father-in-law, was usually there seven days a week. He did not take a holiday. He was an ordinary country man who enjoyed his job.

The police service that we have now and want to develop cannot be based on that model because the young gardaí we have now are trained up and technologically savvy. Most of them have degrees and many of them are studying policing. It is a different system. If we were setting up a police force today, we would not have 700 Garda stations. People talk about how robberies happen along the Border. I lived in Lifford when there were 50 gardaí there and we were terrorised by certain individuals who called gardaí collaborators, protested outside the Garda station and petrol-bombed it. That was 25 years ago, not 50 or 60 years ago. At that stage, there were people on both sides of the Border, but the call for more Garda stations to be open on the Donegal side of the Border is in contrast to the PSNI stations on the other side of the Border which are being closed down. We are now protecting the Border without any police stations on the other side, thanks to Sinn Féin.