€5.2m less being spent on Clare gardaí

Clare’s chief superintendent has revealed there is €5.2m less being spent on gardaí in Clare over the last five-year period.
Chief Supt John Kerin said he calculated Clare’s garda budget recently and outlined that €5.2m less was being spent on salaries, overtime budgets and travel subsistence in the county over a five-year period.
He said in light of the reduced budget the garda’s achievements in the area of crime reduction were “very good”, with a 33% drop across the 11 broad categories of crime in the same five-year period. 
“Despite the popular perception that burglaries are up, they are down 163 over the last five years, or 31%, having said that, there were 364 break ins last year which is on average one a day. Thefts are down 304 crimes but there was still 1,119 thefts in Clare last year, an average of three or four per day. Criminal damage was down 407 but there was still 517. I do want to reduce crime further and the main objective will be to keep it down as best we can with the numbers we’ve got,” he said.
Addressing concerns from the floor that there is a feeling of fear among the general public, particularly those in rural communities, Chief Supt Kerin said, “I get that people have this fear. I think we need to be very careful when talking about crime that we don’t put the fear of God into people because it doesn’t have to be that way. We are in a county that depends on tourism and investments. I’m not saying to hide crime, but be realistic about it. We have one of the lowest crime rates in the country. We have reduced crime by 33%,” he said.
He quantified the reduction in crime by attributing some of it to the mass emigration of young people and the general downturn in the economy. He did say taken with that there were garda strategies that have helped curb the crime rate, such as CCTV initiatives in towns in the county.
He added that the closure of nine garda stations has “definitely created a vacuum” for the gardaí in Clare and will be a challenge to deal with but he was confident that he is “capable of managing what we have now”.
He advised those present that he was concerned about the level of retirements he envisaged in the coming year and believed that by August 2014 25 to 30 gardaí will retire.
For now he said, “we will continue to do the best we can with the numbers we’ve got. If you are in a business or you’re a farmer or whatever you’ll realise if you have x amount of resources today and they are gone from you tomorrow you can’t deliver the same services. It’s not easy but I’m hoping that I won’t have to cut more services and close more garda stations”.