Please stick to your times, Members. Members will lose out otherwise. We have 20 minutes and 15 Members listed.

I express my sympathy to the family and friends of Quham Babatunde, the man who was so tragically killed in a knife attack on South Anne Street early on Saturday morning. Indeed, I express my sympathies and thoughts to those victims of violent crime that evening and in a previous incident in Stoneybatter, also in the city centre of Dublin. These shocking crimes illustrate for many a concern about safety on our city streets and a concern about the need for a more visible Garda presence on the streets. I know the justice Minister has been launching a recruitment campaign, but when I speak to gardaí locally, they tell me there is a still serious shortage still of gardaí, of personnel, available to police our city streets and to make people feel safer. Beyond just advertising for recruitment, what is the Minister doing to ensure that policing becomes-----

Thank you, Deputy. Your time is up. You are taking someone else's time.

-----a more attractive career prospect and to improve pay and conditions for trainee gardaí?

Like the Deputy, I express my deepest sympathies to the family and friends of Quham Babatunde on his shocking death on the streets of Dublin this weekend. We think of all the victims of crime recently in our city and in Stoneybatter. It is unacceptable. Significant additional resources are being put into high-visibility policing in Dublin city centre. More than half of the gardaí who attested last year were allocated to stations across Dublin. Since 2020, there has been a 40% increase in the number of Garda staff working across the DMR, freeing up gardaí for front-line duty. We will continue to resource the Garda in respect of facial recognition technology, body-worn cameras and additional gardaí on an ongoing basis.

The Taoiseach is presiding over a Government that seems to see crime as something to be responded to only after the fact. I read the programme for Government once again earlier, I heard the Taoiseach's statements and I listened to the Minister for Justice on the radio over the weekend.

There does not seem to be any co-ordinated strategy for a violence reduction approach. I hear the Taoiseach talking about increased sentences for knife crime from five to seven years and I have heard him mention body-worn cameras. What are we going to do on violence reduction? We accept violence is increasing on our streets so surely the Taoiseach will accept we need a strategy that is multiagency and that is approaching this from different angles to confront that. There are examples. There is best practice and evidence-based policies. I see none of that in the Government's programmes.

I referenced that in the earlier replies, though some took issue with it, when I said the level of violence in our society needs to be addressed. We believe in proactive measures. We believe in prevention. We need to deal with excess alcohol and drug use, which are factors in violence on our streets and definitely in some instances, though not all, a factor in the unrestricted level of terrible violence people visit upon others, sometimes absolutely without provocation.

Where is the strategy, then?

We need to look at the underlying issues giving rise to such violence on our streets because the Garda will never be at every scene every time. That starts right through our education system and the community in terms of creating an intolerant approach but also different strategies. I do not disagree with the Deputy.