Caít Keane (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the capital plan for 2016 to 2021 that was announced today. It is advance planning over five years. Some €46 million was allocated for Garda vehicles and €205 million for Garda technology. In this country, we still display paper tax, insurance and NCT discs on our cars. That was all right when we did not have the major technology or the facility to photocopy and make fraudulent tax and insurance discs to display. The torches gardaí flash on a car to verify that tax and insurance discs are in order are gone out. The UK and many countries have moved on towards the modern system of automatic numberplate recognition and I ask the Minister to consider it, and not only for financial and cost-saving reasons. A conservative estimate of the cost of procuring, posting and administering of discs is €10 million per year. It is also estimated that fraud adds a minimum of €40 to the cost of the average insurance policy.

There are 136 Garda traffic corps vehicles on the road, of which 80% are already equipped with automatic number plate recognition, which means we are 80% of the way there. Could we go the whole hog and enable gardaí to use smartphones to check tax and NCT compliance? The general trend in every country is that way. Mr. Conor Faughnan of the Automobile Association, AA, has already called for this. Will the Minister equip each garda with a hand-held device? It would be not only for number plate recognition. Another Senator spoke about Garda stations and rural post offices closing down. One can have an office in one's car with a hand-held phone.Every garda should have in their possession automatic number plate recognition plus modern technology to do their reports online. I welcome the announcement by the Minister, Deputy Fitzgerald. It was the biggest announcement in the history of the State for-----