Madam, - I am amused that Senator John Minihan (April 7th) has concluded that I gave the impression of not respecting the decisions of the Oireachtas. We will abide by any such decision. As a representative body, with the welfare of our members uppermost in anything we do, we are merely asking the question: should we not fix what we have first, like every other police force that has a reserve, before implementing such a fundamental change?
Our rights to express the concerns of our members are enshrined in the Garda Act. Does the Senator wish to deny us that right? May I bring him back to when his own party wanted to abolish the Seanad and now here he is using his office as a PD senator to attack the Garda Representative Association for articulating its views on a matter of importance to its members? The Senator's party has become adept at forgetting its own policies for the sake of political expediency.
His utterances are indicative of a Government out of touch with the wishes of the vast majority of the Irish people, 80 per cent of whom said in a recent independent poll that they wished to see the Garda properly resourced before the introduction of the reserve. Indeed in his party colleague Michael McDowell's own poll, conducted for the Department of Justice, 81 per cent of participants said they would prefer to see an increased role for civilians rather than reservists. Why not reactivate the civilianisation programme then, rather than waste €20 million and rising on the reserve?
Senator Minihan's figures on resourcing an Garda Síochána are the standard spin trotted out by the Government in relation to the record increase in the Garda budget. A brief look at CSO figures on Garda overtime over the same period will show a whopping 80 per cent of this so-called record increase has gone on overtime because there are not enough gardaí to do the work required by a growing population. There has been no comparable index-linked increase in capital investment. Only last January the tenders for a Garda radio were published after a six-year delay. What happened to the contract John O'Donoghue signed with Nokia as Minister for Justice in 2001 for a secure radio system which he announced to great fanfare?
It is my contention that what motivated Senator Minihan's letter was my statement that this Government's legacy come the next election will be "patients on trolleys instead of hospital beds, children in prefabs instead of classrooms and now mock gardaí instead of real ones". Don't the PDs have very thin skins of late when people tell them the truth? - Yours, etc,
PJ STONE, General Secretary, Garda Representative Association, Dublin 7.