Lynn Ruane (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State for coming in here today. I am not sure it is always a good idea to come in here and think out loud but potentially that is what I will be doing. I considered whether I should come to the Chamber today for the discussion on public order on safe streets. There is something wrong with that if my perceived idea is, because of some of the contributions I make or the groups for which I advocate, that when I come into this Chamber, the perception will be that somehow, I am okay with particular behaviours, crimes or circumstances. That is not the case. The reason I bring this up is that perception is an interesting thing to think about. My perception today led me to consider if I should come in or if it would be just me again trying to fight for an understanding of some of the people who commit terrible crimes. How do I get people to think about them or think about responding to them in a different way in order that we get to the place of safer streets? All of us want the same thing but I often come at it from the point of view of the most ostracised people; the ones we are labelling, who we call names or thugs or scumbags. Nobody really wants to extend the empathy that far because the behaviour is so abrupt, so harsh and so violent. Sometimes we can struggle to really say what type of work we need to do, beyond policing, to bring us straight to the heart of being able to have those discussions. That was my perception and people will say that is not the perception they had and so on.

I bring up perception because safety is also a matter of perception. If I am in my community and I walk into the local chipper and all the lads are jumping around outside, smoking weed and shouting up to the balcony above, I literally step around them and go into the chipper. If I have a relative with me or somebody from a different community who is not used to that boisterous environment, they become scared. I think they have nothing to be scared of but I can see they are frightened and ask them what is wrong. That is perception. The idea that we are going to respond with strategies and legislation because of perception is not always the way we need to do this. We sometimes need to not respond to Newsnight or weekly reports of O'Connell Street where this and that is happening. We throw the full force at it without giving space and time to think about how we respond to that with a longer-term vision and in a longer-term way that creates real safety, rather than the perception of safety. When we respond really quickly, we give the public the idea that a 24-hour Garda station or more police on the street is going to create more safety. That again for me is just perception because crime has persisted for generations in communities. Crime persisted under the guillotine - can you image that for fear? People were literally guillotined in public if they committed some sort of crime or murder. They were guillotined. Did any of those things every stop, even with the fear of a public spectacle and being guillotined? They did not. My fear is that we just keep going around and around in election cycles, responding to public outcry and to incidents, and never sewing together the threads that have existed since the beginning of time as to why crime exists, how we respond to crime, how we create safety, how we challenge perception and how we make sure communities have real decision-making powers in how we do that. We need to start by decentralising responsibility for some of those decisions. For the past 15 to 20 years, we have put decision-making power back into central government and the Departments instead of creating decision-making authority around community development, how to respond and how to engage with people within communities. For me, the idea of safe streets has to go right back to the idea of safe lives. We can imagine that some of the young men and women who are involved in crime, which we do not want them to be involved in, do not feel safe in their very existence in the world. They struggle to have the foresight to see where they are creating a lack of safety by overreaching into other people's lives, committing crimes or engaging in antisocial behaviour. There is a whole approach that needs to be adopted here. There must be an understanding of the trauma and oppression in the lives of so many people who we do not want to work with. When I first tried to work with drug dealers in Bluebell in 2010 or 2011, there was pushback. People said I should not be working with drug dealers and negative comments were made. I thought it did not make sense. I do not understand why we cannot work with people who sell drugs, instead of completely ostracising them, and figure out that behaviour and why people become involved in it. People sometimes sell drugs because, as a result of their living in poverty, they are groomed to do so. Over the past few years, we have discussed the young eight-year-old children being groomed by gangsters. It is easy for us to make that association, instead of asking whether all of those involved are not all being groomed on the basis of inequality, even those we want to call gangsters or drug dealers. We must ask what is causing the conditions in which people live, why they exist and how can we change them.

We all have to be willing to lose our seats on the back of this. We have to be willing to be ambitious. We cannot believe that we cannot say or do something because we do not want the public to think we are soft on crime. Being soft on crime is just a myth; it is not a thing. Nobody wants crime and everyone wants people to live in a safer world and environment, to flourish, be happy and all of those things. We do not need to be hard on crime, but on the conditions of crime, including poverty. We must create pathways and ways out for people. We still do not have adequate spent conviction laws in this country for people who leave criminality. We are still handing down short sentences. We are calling for mandatory sentences, taking away the discretion of judges to be able to do their jobs in the first place. We saw an awful situation happen in Ballyfermot, yet we did not stop and think about what mandatory sentencing really means. Are we all just going to come in here and shout about it? My worry is that nobody thinks about the implications of mandatory sentencing and how it impacts on the judicial system, on those with mental health issues who may commit acts of violence sometimes and on discretion within the legal system.

People come in here and throw phrases around. At times, many of us do not understand them. I fear that politics will become a place where we all talk about ideas and thoughts in the spur of the moment, but we do not actually consider how we, as a country, can think and act well in order that ten or 20 years from now the future Members of this House will not just be replicas of us saying exactly what we are saying. History repeats itself, and it is so boring to watch. Things go around and around. We all need to take a bit of space and time and think about safety as perception, rather than responding to every incident that happens in communities. I have been living around these types of incidents my whole life. They do not just happen because a camera comes into an area one day.