Gerald Nash (Labour) | Oireachtas source

-----and appointees to this House to fully scrutinise this legislation, to do the business of the people in this House to ensure that the draft laws that we are considering are at the very least constitutional. Otherwise we would not be fulfilling our constitutional roles and responsibilities. The Minister also seems obsessed with policing issues, but only in his own constituency.

I want to raise an episode in my home town in Drogheda where shots were fired at a house in the Rathmullan estate in Drogheda. There is an ongoing local feud. I have repeatedly raised that we have a very limited number of members of An Garda Síochána in our town where most towns of an equivalent size have ten to 12 gardaí per unit per shift. We have five to seven gardaí in the area, trying to police an ongoing violent criminal feud without the resources they need. Any time I raise this issue in this House, I am told by Ministers that it is not their responsibility and they do not allocate members of An Garda Síochána. That did not stop the Minister for Justice and Equality from coming to my home town in December and promising members of An Garda Síochána that they would get what they want and need. Unfortunately, Drogheda did not get the gardaí and resources that it needs.

Deputy Ross is obsessed with the police station in his own home area but he has very little to say about ongoing criminal feuds in areas such as the north side of Dublin, referred to by my colleague, Senator Ó Ríordáin, with the lack of policing resources there, or the lack of policing resources in my community. I would prefer if he stuck to his own brief. If he is expressing an interest in criminal justice, judicial and policing matters, he should do it in a holistic fashion and look at areas that need those resources, not his own area, because that is the worst type of parish pump politics. It is the type of politics that he always said he never represented. It is disgraceful that in this era of so-called new politics, when this Government decided that it was not going to use the guillotine, that it is using it now to fulfil its own agenda for its own narrow purposes. I greatly object to that.