Barry Ward (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The Fine Gael group supports this motion. It makes eminent sense, as all Senators recognise. We are all aware of the difficulties experienced by bus and train drivers and other public transport workers who have had to deal with antisocial behaviour and worse on public transport routes, not only on Dublin Bus, but also on other routes. It is important that there is a clear response from the Government and An Garda Síochána to deal with that and to send out the message that it will not be tolerated. It cannot be tolerated.

As the motion correctly points out, it is negating the significant infrastructure the State has put into public transport, again correctly. The availability of public transport is tremendously important, not only from the point of view of the environmental consequences, taking traffic off the road, allowing people to use much more sustainable forms of transport, but also from the point of view of getting people to work, the shops and other places they need to go without clogging up the roads and doing so in an affordable way. We all recognise the importance of public transport and of that system being safe, secure and welcoming for the people for whom it is put in place.

I do not agree that this motion is unworkable. There have been calls for a transport police and I do not support that. In the UK for example, there is a transport police which is not a police force but essentially a glorified series of security guards. It is tremendously important that we do not emulate that model because it is not what we need. It does not reflect the seriousness of the situation. On the Luas and other services, private security guards boarding trams may well have a deterrent effect but I do not like seeing them there. We should not be putting law and order into the hands of private individuals. We have a police force, one which, as has been said, is very well respected, well regarded and trusted because of the manner in which it approaches both the detection of crime and dealing with the consequences of crime. It is important that we respect the fact that An Garda Síochána is in place and therefore a Garda unit would be a much better way to deal with this than a transport police.

For those who say this is unworkable, the apparent reason is that we do not have enough gardaí, notwithstanding that we have more gardaí and there has been more Government investment in An Garda Síochána than there has been since the force's foundation. The most recent budget, when the Government invested hundreds of millions of euro in policing, is another example of that. It is certainly possible to pick a statistic from last year about how many gardaí were trained, given the hangover from lockdowns and so forth, but the reality is that we have more gardaí available now than ever. Even if we put aside the numbers, we have also invested in the civilianisation of Garda services, putting more than 400 people into civilian roles in Garda stations to free up fully trained uniformed members who were doing those jobs and put them out on the street to police. I do not accept that there is a deficit in policing as a general rule, which is not to say there are no criticisms to be made or that we cannot do with more gardaí and resources.

The starting point for some people in criticising in this debate is to say we should have a garda on every street corner. That is neither feasible nor desirable. When there is a garda on every street corner, it is de facto a police state. That is not what we want. We want effective, well-resourced policing that can get into the places where there are problems, deal with them and move on and can leave the prosecution of those people to the Courts Service or whatever other agency is dealing with it. The Garda must allow that to happen. Of course we can better resource the Garda. We always can, but let us not start from the position of saying there is some kind of failure of resources. There will always be a need for resources in An Garda Síochána. That is true of every police force in the world. However, we have a tremendously safe country with fewer problems of violent crime than other countries, including in the European Union. That will be cold comfort to anyone who has been the victim of an assault, has been on a bus when a fight has broken out or has been present when antisocial behaviour has occurred.

What we must do now is put the mechanisms in place that allow the State, through An Garda Síochána, to ensure that when an incident happens there is a solution, someone is there or there is a quick response. The best way to do that is to put in place a specific unit which is not only available to go to the scene of these incidents and deal with them, but is specially trained and tasked to deal with them and has the competencies that are required beyond the ordinary training gardaí receive to go to scenes and deal with these issues. For example, I am aware - this is something that has been discussed and I look forward to listening to what the Minister of State has to say - that the Cathaoirleach, as my party's former transport spokesperson, has spoken in favour of this in other meetings. It is an ongoing discussion.

Let there be no mistake, however. No one in Fine Gael - I cannot speak for other parties but I suspect that no one from any party in these Houses - is in any doubt about the seriousness of this issue or the need to deal with it. Steps are being taken now. Let us not pour cold water on those steps. Let us acknowledge that progress has been made and, rather than picking selective statistics, let us recognise that there are concrete steps we can take. We can put in place the dedicated unit that is called for in the motion. We can implement both an outward signal and an effective measure to deal with this kind of crime.