Aidan Davitt (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I wish to speak about Garda morale, which is at an all-time low. Rank and file gardaí with whom I have spoken in recent weeks have told me that they, while on their beat, face an onslaught of allegations of corruption from ordinary members of the public. Something that I would otherwise have found hard to believe brought it home to me today, though. I was passing through a provincial town at 8.30 a.m. where a 40 year old chap was sitting at the window of a barber shop waiting to get in. As a Garda car passed by, this guy stuck his fingers up at it. I went to do a bit of work and so on and returned through the town when I happened to meet the Garda car at a petrol station. When I asked the gardaí what that had been about, they told me that they were used to it and that, over the past two years, respect for the Garda had been at an all-time low.

There are problems in the Garda, although many are legacy problems. We are pillorying the Garda Commissioner about accounts and systems that were set up in the 1960s but, speaking as someone without an accountancy background, where are we going? I am sure that many mistakes have been made at the top echelons of the Garda and I am not here to defend the Commissioner or the top echelons, but we must be careful about what we want as a society. If we continue to hammer the Garda at every available opportunity, where will we go? If there is a problem with law and order or any other issue, we usually turn to gardaí. If we are not going to protect and back gardaí and place the full rigour of the law behind them, there will be a serious social problem in Ireland. It is happening now. There is a disconnect between people on the ground and the Garda. As we have been told by senior gardaí, there is a severe threat level of terrorist attack for the first time in 25 years, but gardaí will have a worse relationship with people on the ground, and it is not of their doing. I ask that every stakeholder, including senior politicians and the media, get behind rank and file gardaí. If we do not have rank and file gardaí operating correctly, we will have no State. That is the bottom line.