Ceisteanna ó Cheannairí - Leaders' Questions Dail Éireann — 2026-04-30 ============================================================ Simon Harris (FG), Wicklow I join with Deputy Gannon in acknowledging the huge sense of trauma, fear, disgust and shock being felt in the community of Ballymun and by people right across this country, but nowhere more acutely than in Ballymun. As the Deputy rightly said, on 28 April, a man armed with a handgun was seen near Ballymun Garda station where a second man was being detained. Both are suspected of being involved in an ongoing feud. Gardaí approached the man with the firearm. He ran away, was pursued and threw the gun into bushes as he made his escape. That gun was then subsequently picked up and fired by a child of around 11 years of age. Thank God, nobody was injured in the shooting, but as the Deputy says, it was for the grace of God that nobody was injured. A short time later, two men arrived on an electric bike and took the gun away but the weapon has still not been recovered in spite of intensive searches by gardaí, including armed units. I am conscious that two males were subsequently arrested - a man in his 20s and a teenager - in connection with the incident and both have been detained under section 30 of the Offences Against the State Act. That is law and order. When a crime or an alleged crime is carried out, people should be detained, arrested and questioned. I believe the man in his 20s is still being questioned in connection with the incident while the teenager has been released without charge, pending a file being issued to the Director of Public Prosecutions. I know that the Minister, Deputy O'Callaghan, has been briefed by the Garda on the circumstances concerning the incident in Ballymun. I am obviously aware that there have been arrests and I do not want to comment too much on that part, but I join with the Deputy and everyone else in this House in asking anybody with any information in connection with the investigation to come forward either to the local Garda station in Ballymun or to the Garda confidential line where any information they have will be treated with the utmost confidence. I want to say to the community in Ballymun that at the end of February, 268 gardaí were assigned to Ballymun district. Of those,160 were assigned to Ballymun Garda station. Since 2024, 34 probational gardaí have been assigned to Ballymun. To tackle some of the deep-rooted issues that have existed over many years in the community, the Ballymun Implementation Board was established in 2024 by my colleague, the former Minister for justice, Deputy McEntee. The board is led by an independent chair, hosted by Dublin City Council and brings together relevant social services, providers and the Garda to work together with community leaders and local business leaders. We have provided funding of €200,000 through the Department of justice to help with the running of the board. It would be useful for us to have further engagement with it as a Government in terms of concrete steps that we can take. We changed the law with regard to children being coerced into crime. For anybody to solicit or coerce a child is a particularly disgusting and heinous crime. While the Deputy makes the point this is often the most deprived communities in Ireland, drug use is often not in those most deprived areas. It is happening in so-called middle-class areas - middle Ireland - where people are snorting a line of coke at the weekend, not thinking of the devastating consequences it is having on communities, and that action should be called out too. --- 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/2026-04-30/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-27T06:54:49+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-04-30