Garda Síochána (Powers) Bill 2026: Committee Stage (Resumed) Seanad Éireann — 2026-06-10 ============================================================ Lynn Ruane (IND), University of Dublin When we look at capturing ethnicity and, like Senator McDowell said, at how racial bias or unconscious bias comes into how we make decisions around policing, there is also something in relation to ensuring that we look at class. For a long time, class was at the forefront of how police made their decisions in terms of what community they policed the most. If a community is more policed, a person is more likely to encounter gardaí in their day at regular intervals and have more exposure. If somebody is over-policed and the use of stop and search is used more on them because police are present in that community more, we are going to find that the community is the most represented within the courts or prison system. I would argue that in all instances of types of crimes. All types of communities, for instance, use substance. We have discussed stop and search in relation to the possession of drugs earlier, but it is relevant here. If you go to any District Court, you are not seeing barristers up on stop and search for possession charges. We are not seeing members of An Garda Síochána, teachers, pilots or wherever else there is another concentration. As an addiction practitioner since the age of 17, I know they are carrying substances but they are not represented in the prison system and statistics. If all types of people use drugs but not all types of people end up convictions for them, that has to tell us that there is a use of stop and search on certain communities. We will see more and more of that applied in relation to ethnicity and nationality. When looking at my amendments alongside Senator McDowell's that names ethnicity, I attempted to mirror some of the information that is already taken on the PULSE system for victims of crime. I am not creating a new category that does exist, which is what initially was said. They just have not been used for stop and search. While nationality does not necessarily capture ethnicity, nationality is currently on the PULSE system for victims of crime. Home circumstances are also included. That can mean whether a person is living with somebody or living on his or her own. There are a few options and there are drop-down categories within that. While it does not get to the heart of ethnicity and class specifically in what I am putting forward, I am saying that currently on the PULSE system there are mechanisms for other ways to record. Why would they not be applied here? The police in Scotland pushed back quite heavily around the adding of ethnicity as a category. They said that they do not police that way and do not have discriminatory practices within their policing methods. Just because the police are not sitting around and deciding to search a person because he or she is black, from a particular community or for whatever reason does not mean it is not happening simply because it is not acknowledged out loud. When Scotland's police resisted some of the categories, they were adamant that there were not discriminatory practises. When the recording of that data happened, we saw very quickly what communities are policed and stopped and searched. That is why it is very important. I do not know why I have mentioned Covid twice in this contribution but I recall statistics that came out in relation to Covid and who received fines. I cannot remember exactly if it was the 5 km rule. When I compared the statistics of the people who received fines in relation to Covid regulations, they were not received at the Forty Foot where there were hundreds of people out swimming, on the beaches or in other communities. The likes of Ballymun and other places were hugely represented in the number of fines in the surrounding areas there. The police acknowledged at that time in the justice committee that the statistics were accurate. What is behind that is a decision. Who makes a decision about where gardaí are placed in any particular moment? Where they are placed is where they are going find reasons to stop and search people. It is not always necessarily because they are the community that are breaking the rules alone and that everybody else is not. Covid regulations are an example of that where all different types of people for whatever reasons were breaking particular Covid rules, but the fines were very concentrated in particular communities. That shows that policing decisions are made. It is good for us to be able to have a full analysis of how those decisions are made, how they are impacting those communities and how we integrate that understanding into policing methods in Ireland. --- 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/seanad/2026-06-10/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:55:02+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-06-10