Shane Cassells (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The Minister is welcome to the Chamber. Back in 2017, at a meeting of the Committee of Public Accounts, of which I was a member, we had the then Garda Commissioner, Nóirín O'Sullivan, before us, and she spoke of her belief that the streets were inherently safe and of how there was not an issue in the country. Her comments came in the same week that the local newspaper of the Minister and myself, the Meath Chronicle, carried a front-page story of still images of our then Mayor of Navan, Councillor Tommy Reilly, pulling a gang of thugs off his son, who was being violently beaten to a pulp outside their shop in Navan, which made national news. Senator Kyne has said that one incident does not define a town but if we fast forward six years, the latest viral video of crime doing the rounds on Facebook and YouTube is again in Navan, where two thugs challenged workmen a couple of weeks ago on the main street in the town. These men were going about doing their jobs in broad daylight and they were threatened by one of these thugs who wielded a hammer to one man's head, before one of their colleagues intervened, duly picked up a shovel, floored him to the back of the head and left him on the ground. That video was viewed by hundreds of thousands of people, to the extent that I had friends of mine who work in major multinationals here whose bosses in the US had seen the video asking them if they were from this town where people are going around wielding hammers and flattening people in the back of their heads with shovels. What is worrying is that this scenario of being able to freely walk down the main street of a provincial town and carry on like that is becoming acceptable and the norm.

The Minister is well aware of these issues because she has visited met the traders in Navan. She has held numerous meetings, she has engaged to try to tackle these issues head-on and she has met the victims of these crimes. I do not feel unsafe in my town. I was raised in the centre of Navan, I walk the streets of my town late at night and I do not feel a sense of fear. However, I am conscious of the citizens of my town who have that sense of fear because they see these videos and they feel fearful that they are not able to walk the town and that unlawfulness is pervasive. That has been allowed because of a growth in minor criminal activities. We have a scenario where theft, not just in Dublin city centre but in towns like Navan, is on the rise. General antisocial behaviour and intimidatory tactics are also on the rise. The Minister saw herself how in the town there are general misdemeanours such as the growth in graffiti and so forth. There is a sense among the criminals that they can get away with it. I do not want that growth in minor criminal activity leading to a scenario where the town of Drogheda, our near neighbours and the second biggest town in the province alongside Navan, had to have a special action plan because more high-scale, professional and criminal groups took a stranglehold of the centre of that town. I do not want the same situation for my town of Navan, where those minor criminal operators suddenly have a sense that they can elevate themselves onto a bigger stage and where those who operate in peddling drugs and so forth in gangland crime come in and take control. We have seen the impact when public order units are deployed in towns; it dissuades such crime.

My main point is that the model is broken. I agree with Senator McDowell, and I have confidence in the Garda Commissioner whom we met in Navan. I refer to the new model that has been introduced in policing divisions, where counties Meath and Westmeath are merged. Westmeath has a population of 96,000, whereas Meath has a population of 223,000, yet Westmeath has double the number of gardaí as our county. The model is broken and it is broken along with so many aspects of our society. It is broken in health as well, where we have a scenario where the HSE would want to shut the main hospital in the county town of Meath. While gardaí and health officials are experts in their areas, they are not experts when it comes to planning societies and towns. When I ask those people if they look at the future planning documents for counties like Meath, Louth or Galway, they answer that they do not do so because it is not within their remit to do so; they operate in silos. However, it is our job as public representatives to make those points. While the Minister will say to us that it is the Garda Commissioner's job to police, it is our job as public representatives to bring the reality of what is happening on the ground to the Minister. We must say that if the model is broken, and it clearly is, then there has to be a change. It is simply not right that a county with 220,000 people has half the number of gardaí that a county of 96,000 people has. The Garda Commissioner might say that is okay but it is not okay and it leaves a scenario, as I have pointed out to the Minister, where we are not able to man those extra divisions in large towns like Navan.

I want to be positive with the Minister in the onerous job she has. Equally so, I want to say that the model has to change because it is not fitting the challenges we face.