I wish all the Senators a happy St. John's Day. St. John's Day is a religious festival which we celebrate quite strongly at home in Aghinagh. There will be a mass celebrated at St. John's Well tonight at 8 p.m. and following that, there will be a platform dance on the Mushera platform on Mushera mountain between Aghinagh and Millstreet at 8.45 p.m. RTÉ will be there also, briefly, to do a clip, because it is doing a piece on traditions in the area. I wish well everyone who is attending it and the group behind the Mushera Platform dance and the maintenance of St. John's Well.

I want to speak about another local issue, but one which I am sure affects constituencies all across the country, and that is the rise we are seeing in rural crime. Over the past few weeks, in my own area of mid-Cork, across Dripsey, Aghabullogue and Rylane, we are seeing a spate of car thefts late at night in rural country yards but also in village housing estates. We need, I believe, a cross-departmental approach to dealing with this. It is a Department of justice issue but it is also a Department of rural affairs and community development issue. There is a rural safety plan, which was published in 2025, but we need to take more measures. We need to give more supports to groups, such as Muintir na Tíre and Community Alert. We need to provide more information and awareness to residents in rural areas as to how they can make their property more safe at night and how they can protect themselves.

A larger problem in this regard is rural isolation, that communities are probably not as strong or as close as they once were and, therefore, it is difficult for communities to work together against these kind of things. We are seeing that Community Alert groups and Muintir na Tíre groups, while still a big part of rural life and rural Ireland, are not as strong as they once were. I am calling for us to have the Minister for justice in here to discuss this issue, not so much for statements but on how we tackle it and what we can do to prevent it, for example, whether we need to look at stronger sentencing and better community awareness and to discuss the rural safety plan of 2025.