Cabinet Committees
Dail Éireann — 2026-09-16
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Albert Dolan (FF), Galway East

A huge amount of work has been done by An Garda Síochána to recruit new members. Understandably, after each attestation, the gardaí are allocated to different stations right across the country. My huge problem with that is that in the last three attestations, Galway received, in total across the over 700 gardaí that were allocated, only four gardaí. That is not four gardaí for one town in Galway or one small village; that is for the entirety of County Galway, the city and Connemara. It is a huge area that received only four gardaí.
I wrote to the Commissioner on 24 July to highlight this matter because I was really frustrated by it. What it worked out at was that in Galway, we were receiving one garda per 64,000 of population. That was our allocation. I welcome the recent reallocation of 28 additional gardaí to the high-visibility policing efforts now taking place in Galway city. From speaking to the community gardaí in Galway city centre, they are seeing hugely positive results from this high-visibility policing. It is working in Galway city.
Galway needs to be focused on and given a greater allocation moving forward. That means that stations in Athenry, Gort, Loughrea, Headford, Portumna and Tuam would see an increased allocation, that we would start to see that flow not just into Galway city but throughout the county, and that people would see higher visibility from the gardaí in the county because there would be the resources to do so. What consideration will be given to the fact that Galway has had such an underallocation of gardaí from recent attestations?

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-09-16/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-09-28T05:50:48+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-09-16