Jim D'Arcy (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I support Senator Brennan in his comments on Garda Tony Golden, who lived four or five doors away from me in the village of Blackrock in County Louth. He was a wonderful person. Sometimes one says that and it means nothing, but in this case it is absolutely true. He was a man of outstanding integrity and a great family man who liked nothing better than to spend his spare time with his three beautiful little children. My heart goes out to his wife Nicola, who is from the village, and the extended family on their great loss.

Sometimes, we do not appreciate enough the risks gardaí take in protecting us, the people. They go out and do this work so that we can sleep safely in our beds. I offer my sympathy and condolences to all members of the force. They must be feeling terrible today at the loss of their colleague such a short time after the loss of another of their colleagues, Adrian Donohoe, whose child I enrolled in the national school when I was teaching in Bellurgan. Today is not the day to see what solutions we can find to these problems, but Senator Paul Coghlan and others drafted a report calling for a beefed-up special tasks unit to deal with criminality. I supported that recommendation at the time and I support it now not because of this horrific and unacceptable tragedy, but because we need to combat the fallout from the Troubles, where some criminals have taken over the trade in misery that has been ongoing for so long.