When Capital Calls the Gardaí Answer - More Gardaí announced for Cork City Centre

Stiofán Mac an tSionnaigh

Cork City centre is to see a large and immediate increase in the number of gardaí patrolling the streets, with 48 officers being reallocated to the area. This includes both probationary gardaí and those being reassigned from elsewhere.

An Garda Síochána have said that the move is part of their High Visibility Policing strategy, which has been implemented in Dublin City centre since March, and is intended to target “public order offences, anti-social behaviour, drug dealing, aggressive begging and shoplifting”.

Gardaí are also pursuing a “pro-arrest policy” for repeat offenders.

It should come as no surprise where the push for this kind of action is coming from, and who the priority is. The Cork Business Association (CBA), which represents business in the Cork City area, has been quite clear that the rationale behind the increase is to use the Gardaí as a tool to clear the streets for shoppers, to increase footfall, and to therefore increase revenues in the lead-up to Christmas.

An Garda Síochána is similarly open about this - Chief Superintendent for Cork City Thomas Myers said that the gardaí being reassigned are doing so at the behest of their “key stakeholders” (i.e. businesses).

With this move, the nakedly coercive role of gardaí in the bourgeois state is again exposed. Rather than, as they claim, being a force which aims to protect citizens, they are instead solely concerned with protecting and promoting the interests of capital. 

This is not to say that anti-social behaviour is not an issue in Cork City. There is a serious element of risk, especially for women, associated with travelling into the centre, particularly after dark.

While a drop in anti-social behaviour in the city centre will certainly be welcomed - and it has been recorded as a result of the pilot scheme in Dublin - the impetus for the policy is what is at issue.

“Public safety” in this instance is only valuable as long as it serves to increase revenues, and where that element does not exist - for instance, in much of the working class areas on the city’s Northside - gardaí are nowhere to be found.

Meanwhile, the systemic problems that lead to anti-social behaviour are left unaddressed. Public housing is left uncared for and in many cases uninhabitable; substance abuse is endemic and no funding is forthcoming that will tackle it in a way that won’t harm users; and when gardaí do make an appearance it is simply to drive the people most in need of support back out of sight and out of mind of the middle class.

The answer is always simply more gardaí, more arrests, and more violence directed at the working class.