SEANAD REPORT: A radical look at the whole nature of policing needs to be taken, the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform told the House.
Referring to a suggestion by party colleague Mr John Minihan, Mr McDowell said the idea of a reserve police force was something that he had discussed with the Garda Commissioner.
"Whereas my thinking and his thinking is inchoate at this stage, I do want to say this, that we have to get to a situation where traffic, minding museums, looking after diplomats and thinks like that, may not all be carried out by fully qualified policemen from now on.
"To put one guard in a hut outside my house - which by the way has not happened and is not going to happen - would require the deployment of 5.2 gardaí. To put two people behind a counter of a rural station on a 24-hour basis requires 10.4 gardaí."
Mr McDowell said there must be a requirement to think differently about how resources were marshalled. Many of the Garda Síochána's procedures and structures had hardly changed one jot since its foundation 75 years ago.
Mr McDowell said his support for the force was in no way diminished by his desire to manage and drive the process of change which he felt was needed.
Addressing the House on crime, the Minister said organised crime was a global problem in which opportunity was a key factor.
As measures were taken to respond to drug-trafficking, for example, experience showed that criminal gangs looked for opportunities elsewhere. Trafficking in human beings, for instance, was a new and serious form of international criminal activity which was now being experienced here.
There was clear evidence, he regretted to say, that people resident here of eastern European extraction were heavily involved in this business and that they were succeeding to some extent in normalising their activities through lap-dancing and other fronts for plain old-fashioned prostitution and enslavement of women in what was called the sex trade.
"Where those phenomena appear it is sometimes tempting for the media to try and say 'Oh, how liberal we are, we have lap-dancing clubs here and there', but where they are fronts for prostitution, which they are, we should remember that prostitution is the thin end of the organised crime wedge. There isn't such a thing in Ireland at any rate and there never is likely to be in my view, a significant sex trade, to use that phrase, which is not dominated by organised crime."
He added: "Those same interests and people connected with them of Irish extraction are trying to dominate the security industry as well and that is an issue on which we should very, very careful." Mr McDowell appealed to the Oireachtas to push through the Securities Industries Bill.
"We cannot allow organised crime to use the mask of security as a means of extending their capacity to extort money from industry, to dominate the drugs trade by use of bouncers and to take money off people by way of protection rackets."
Referring to the incidents outside Leinster House on Wednesday night, Mr McDowell said he did not think there had been any over-reaction by gardaí. He believed that there had been a contrived effort to make gardaí look the enemy of decent people.
Earlier, Mr Jim Higgins (FG) said he had witnessed at first hand what had happened. "It was more reminiscent of a fascist display rather than a pacifist display."
The anti-war protest group had obviously been infiltrated by "rabble, some of whom had a considerable amount of military experience not so long ago in this country and wrought havoc in this country." He agreed with other speakers that gardaí had acted with commendable restraint in the face of terrible taunts and gross provocation.