I went for a walk around town this evening to see the Christmas lights with my young fella and saw two gardai on Patrick Street + a garda van parked by the Share crib, my only crib is that it took nearly a half an hour of driving around in circles before I found a parking space, but I was determined not to miss the chance to go walkabout on a rare dry evening so eventually we found a spot. There was no sense of edginess about the place and this was without any event being on to bring out the crowds.
We have to realise that the violent scenes we see amplified on social media of fights and assaults in town are isolated incidents and not a sign that the city is somehow unsafe, of course the visible garda presence helps but most people in town at any given time are just going about their business and not giving off bad vibes.
The gardai really need to start clamping down on bad driver behaviour for sure, they could make a start by tackling illegal number plates and doing random tax and insurance checks which could be done by having random checkpoints
It might be a challenge to catch people driving on their phones or breaking red lights but there's no excuse for the gardai not having more checkpoints to observe if motorists have up to date tax and insurance discs etc.
