Last Thursday, during statements here on a report on inclusion, I mentioned Lisa and Aoife O'Rourke's final appearances on Thursday and Friday last. I was lucky, on Saturday evening, to be a part of the welcoming committee welcoming them back to their native Castlerea with their families and their two gold medals. It is something we are getting used to.

Today, I want to bring it back to something that I have raised here on a number of occasions in terms or resourcing the Garda. Probably to follow on from what Senator Gallagher has said about the resources, it is getting to a stage where I am wondering whether we will need Lisa and Aoife O'Rourke to apply justice to certain things across Roscommon because of the lack of resources.

I did some research over the weekend to find out the volume of cases that the Garda was dealing with under section 19 of the Criminal Justice Act 2011, which mandates financial institutions and individuals to report suspected corporate or financial fraud. Some of the stations across Roscommon are dealing with ten plus cases a day in this. Each of those cases, no matter how small - quite a lot of them only relate to €2 or €3 missing out of people's accounts - requires the same Garda intervention as €5,000, €6,000 or €10,000 disappearing out of their accounts. How can we expect to have the Garda numbers looking at the importation of tobacco, drugs, etc., if they are tied up on a daily basis with these small cases? I tried to find an idea of the number of cases that we were dealing with here. The Central Statistics Office excludes all section 19 referrals from its quarterly and annual fraud, deception and related offences metrics because financial institutions are submitting an overwhelming volume of these mandatory reports and the system currently is not able to deal with that. An Garda Síochána noted in 2024 that the sheer scale of the section 19 backlog was so substantial that when the number would finally be cleared and processed, it was expected to trigger a massive artificial surge in Ireland's national fraud statistics. Given the profits that have been made by the financial institutions in this country, surely we need to look at levying the banks to look after these small cases on their own so that we can take that work off the Garda at an earlier stage and find out if people wish to proceed with these small minor robberies and fraud cases.

I would like to also congratulate Senator Duffy on taking the Leader's seat. The people of Mayo, especially north Mayo, will do their very best to ensure that the Senator does not get used to that particular seat but I congratulate the Senator on today and wish him the very best of luck with it.