Crime Prevention
Dail Éireann — 2026-01-15
============================================================

Gary Gannon (SD), Dublin Central

I went back and read Deputy Hearne's contribution as the Minister of State was speaking. His contribution was targeted at the Department of justice and the Minister responsible. We do not doubt for a second the work of the Garda, given the supports available to it. It is not the Garda itself that leaves police stations understaffed or undermanned. That is the responsibility of those who allocate budgets, which is the Government.
I find it quite insulting to the Garda that because we have an exchange in the Chamber to do with budgetary allocations and absolute priorities, the Minister of State says we are going after the Garda. Let me be clear: we are going after his Department - the Department of justice. It was not the Garda, for example, that failed to facilitate a parliamentary discussion on drug-related intimidation, which we have been asking for since early December. It was the Government and Chief Whip, who was present today, that did not allow those discussions. Please do not conflate the two. Gardaí do a difficult job in difficult circumstances. It is the absence of priority from the Government that enables a scenario in which some communities are absolutely not policed as well as others. That is also something the Minister has written into the record of this House, when he said that there are parts of Dublin that are not as safe as other parts. Which parts was he referring to exactly? Probably not his constituency in Dublin 4. It is definitely the more marginalised communities that are left to deal with these incidents. It is also hard to take the Government seriously when it tells me that it is tackling drug-related and gang-related intimidation and violence when we see that only 4% of cases have led to prosecutions. That is only 4% of cases out of 2,500 incidents since 2021.
I would like to work with the Department on prioritising the issue of drug-related intimidation. It is very clearly costing lives and destroying communities. The DRIVE programme is a good start but it does not have the right level of funding allocation. People do not know too much about it and it is not endemic in the heart of the communities that are most impacted by the violence we are discussing.

---

Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-01-15/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:30+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-01-15