First, I want to acknowledge former Deputy and Senator, Paudie Coffey, who is in the Gallery.

Last week, I received a text message that was supposedly from my daughter, telling me about a new phone number that she has. As my nine-year-old and ten-year-old daughters were sitting beside me when I received this message, I immediately knew it was a scam. However, text scams, WhatsApp messages and emails are things we are all experiencing every day of the week now. One in three of the population, or 35% of adults in Ireland, have experienced fraud through these particular mechanisms. According to a report a last week, a third of those affected never reported it. I was interested to see that €160 million is the proposed value of fraud in Ireland at the moment, and that is supposed to be underestimated. Some 57% of people who report these crimes get their money back, but we are still looking at a very high percentage of people not reporting it and not getting their money back. That is something we really need to target.

Last Friday, 193 new gardaí were attested from the Garda College in Templemore. A further class of over 200 Garda recruits is commencing this week in Templemore and will be out in the next 11 or 12 weeks. However, once again, for what I think is the 24th month, the Longford-Roscommon division has received no additional gardaí, and this goes back to my original point about online fraud. I have been told that instances of fraud in Longford and Roscommon have increased significantly. We do not have enough gardaí on the street, never mind enough to deal with the online fraud.

I am once again calling for a further debate in this House on garda numbers and the specialist units that are dealing with individual crimes because somebody is significantly benefiting from this fraud at the moment, and God knows what that money is going towards.