Alison Comyn (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister, Deputy O'Callaghan, and the Minister of State for coming here today and affording us a valuable opportunity to raise what is a very serious issue. There cannot be anybody here in this Chamber who is not appalled by the level of street crime and knife violence that has been happening right across the country. It is not just in our cities, but it is in our towns and in our villages. Only a couple of days ago there was another stabbing incident in Kerry. What we have to look at is the importance of community involvement in tackling this issue.

I will talk about my home town of Drogheda. If we rewind to between 2017 and 2020, we were visited by horrendous crime. We were in the grips of a drugs feud. We saw violence on the streets like we never saw before. One of the ways we tackled it was that we got an injection of gardaí, which was invaluable. Do not get me wrong; we could still do with more boots on the ground. However, it simply would not have been possible to get to where it is now without that injection. Another major part of it was community involvement.

When we talk about community involvement, it is not only the likes of the community gardaí, which Senator Duffy mentioned and who do incredible work, and the Garda diversion programmes. It is also about the people who are in those communities where it is a small minority who usually take part in this crime. They know them, they know their families, and they know how to tackle the root cause. There was a scoping exercise by Vivian Geiran which provided 70 recommendations on how to improve what was happening in Drogheda and the north east. That gave way to the Drogheda implementation board, which did incredible work to try to bring in some of those recommendations, many of which concerned investing in our local communities and giving the necessary funding in order to make the changes. Of course, that has given way to, as Senator Fitzpatrick said, a local community safety partnership. I urge that this be rolled out across the country, because this is where it gets to the heart of where the problems are. I wish all the best to Gráinne Berrill, another Drogheda woman, who is now the director of the National Office for Community Safety. These are pioneering schemes and we have seen them work in one part of the country. This is where we need to be going in the rest of the country.

Looking towards some of the more welcome statements of leadership we have seen from Ministers in the past week or so, I really do welcome the likes of the stricter laws, the tougher sentences that are being mentioned and the stopping and searching. At my peril, I have to slightly disagree with my colleague, Senator Keogan, when it comes to the likes of weapon amnesties. I will rewind again to when I was a news reporter working in the UK. I was sent to Sunderland, where they were experiencing some very serious street crime. I am of the opinion that we should look at anything that gets these weapons off the streets. They had amnesties there where knives and guns were handed in anonymously and without consequence and they received thousands. As I said, anything that can take them off the streets should be looked at.

When we are talking about knife crime, it is unfortunately not like gun crime in that knives are readily available everywhere. We all have knives in our kitchens. What I would probably focus on is the likes of these zombie knives and the sickles, swords or machetes that are being used in many of these cases, as these are not so readily available. Is it possible to check whether there could be tighter controls on the importing of these and on websites? It is quite possible some are being legitimately bought, but can we tighten up on any sort of law on importing those? This is about trying to get as many as we can off the streets.

I thank the Ministers for their engagement here today. There is so much that we can do within our communities. As in Senator Duffy's area, in my area, we have the likes of desperate dereliction and vacancy, which means that our streets are not safe and they are dark and not well-lit. We just simply do not have enough businesses but that is a matter for another day.