James Browne (Wexford, Fianna Fail)
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128. To ask the Tánaiste and Minister for Justice and Equality the number of convictions for animal theft; the type of animal that was subject to the theft; the court in which the perpetrators of the theft were convicted; the number of those sentenced to imprisonment in each of the years 2015 to 2019, in tabular form; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [16168/20]

Helen McEntee (Meath East, Fine Gael)
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I regret that it will not be possible to provide the data the Deputy has requested.

I am informed by the Courts Service that the ability to pull together data for this PQ is dependent upon being able to isolate animal theft in their records over any other type of theft. For other offences, this is possible because the offence type has a specific code on An Garda Síochána's PULSE system, which the Courts Service use for populating their own records.

Unfortunately, there is no specific code on PULSE for theft of animals. The same code is used for all types of theft and it would require the checking of individual records to separate out theft of animals from other types of theft. Given the numbers of offences of theft every year, this is too onerous a task to narrow down over the four year period the deputy has requested.