Garda stations and public safety

Sir, – Christy Galligan (Letters, September 13th) fails to take into account modern concepts of policy. He argues that the closure of 139 Garda stations was poor policy. By any yardstick, with about 707 there are still too many such stations in our State.

Across the Border, there are just 47 PSNI stations open in Northern Ireland, so by our yardstick they should have 250? Scotland, a comparable largely rural country with a population of 5.2 million, has 347. Having a Garda station “open” is a misnomer as it incurs a garda sitting in it with few if any callers. What is important to the public is having gardaí out and about preventing and detecting crime. We do not have ambulance and fire stations at every crossroads.

Of the stations closed, 88 per cent involved one-person units which meant they were open very irregularly for callers. In older days, when gardaí were obliged to live in areas they served in, they were close to the public but now gardaí for most part commute long distances to work and then disappear back home.

Regionalisation of policing now means there are specialist unit operations and this has been seen to great effect in drugs, hostage situations and other serious matters of late. When we had gardaí serving and living in the many stations during the 30 years of violence on our island, the gardaí were ineffectual in combating subversion and sadly our Republic was a base and supply chain for a campaign which went on largely undetected, despite some rare successes.