Dublin riots: ‘Political justification for looting shops’ should be resisted, says Harris

Garda numbers are suffering because the Garda Training College in Templemore had to be closed twice during the Covid pandemic but will start to grow again, Minister for Higher Education Simon Harris has said.

He acknowledged there were not enough gardaí at present, with figures showing that the current strength of the force is 13,800 down from 14,133 at the start of the year.

A further 800 to 1,000 gardaí are due to be recruited next year beginning in December.

“Garda numbers will grow again and we will see more gardaí on the streets,” he said.

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He also told Morning Ireland that 165 of the 227 gardaí who had come out of the training college in Templemore have been deployed to Dublin “where they are needed right now”.

[ Senior gardaí promise large-scale arrests of Dublin riot ringleaders and participants ]

[ Helen McEntee faces a career-defining crisis in the wake of Dublin riots ]

Mr Harris deputised as Minister for Justice while Helen McEntee was on maternity leave earlier this year.

He told the programme that last week’s violence was down to “opportunistic criminality and thuggery” on the part of those responsible. The looting and burning had been an attack on the institutions of the State, he said, and could not be justified in any circumstances.

“I’m not willing to buy into the argument that Thursday was about a far-right gathering. We should never find some kind of political justification for looting shops, for torching buses or for attacking gardaí.”

The far right, he said, had been trying to “sow division and chaos in communities for a significant period of time” and the scale and speed of how the violence developed was “unprecedented and the gardaí responded in force”.

A full review of what happened will be carried out by the Garda Commissioner Drew Harris as commissioned by Ms McEntee.

He defended the Minister for Justice saying that she made €10 million available during the summer to put it into Dublin policing. “We can’t detract from the efforts of frontline gardaí during the summer just because of what happened on Thursday,” he said.

“€10 million meant many extra hours of gardaí on the beat and higher visibility policing.”

He also blamed the social media campaigns, particularly X (Twitter) for allowing the dissemination of hate on their platforms.

Speaking on the same programme, Labour spokesman on Justice Aodhán Ó Ríordáin stopped short of calling for the resignation of Helen McEntee saying it would only amount to political point scoring.

He described An Garda Síochána as a “beleaguered” force with 116 resignations this year alone.

“We have a Dublin city centre that is run on overtime. We have a failure to tackle the far right in two ways. One is not taking seriously the protest at libraries; the second is the type of violent language used at accommodation centres where people have been actively saying to burn them out,” he said.

“There hasn’t been the high-profile information campaign by the Government on the facts and figures of immigration, on the truths and the lies. We are always on the back foot when it comes to lies and misinformation about immigration.

“It would be very easy to front up a high-profile campaign about what the facts of immigration are, but they haven’t done that. They have left to Roderic O’Gorman [Minister for Integration] and completely isolated him in his role.”

As a consequence, the far right platforms are “winning the information war and then you have a beleaguered garda force unable to cope”, Mr Ó'Ríordáin said.

He said the far right have been facilitated by social media companies and these companies had not been held to account by the Government.”