‘Garda lives in danger’ in North Wexford
THERE was an impassioned plea from Chairman of the Gorey District Joe Sullivan for the restoration of Gorey Garda Station to the status of a district headquarters given a recent spate of shocking violent crime there in recent weeks.
A former Garda Detective himself, Cllr Sullivan was extremely critical of the previous garda commissioner and the changes that were implemented in Wexford.
‘Can I just congratulate the gardaí in Gorey on their handling of a situation that no unarmed gardaí should have to face,’ he said, referring to an incident which saw shots fired at a garda patrol car near Gorey during a high speed chase.
‘I’m asking you to talk to your superiors and ask them to do anything they can to try and get Gorey restored to a district headquarters. There are huge overflows of crime coming into the area. Anyone with even a passing interest in law and order knows what a stupid, ill thought out decision it was in the first place.’
‘ The people who took that decision have now left the stage and what they’ve left is the garda lives in danger.’
Cllr Fionntán Ó’Súilleabháin also raised some major concerns in relation to north Wexford. ‘We’ve had a garda car shot at,’ he said. ‘We have known members of the Hutch and Kinahan gangs in north Wexford. We’ve had a series of CAB raids.’
‘What we want to know is do gardaí have the resources to deal with this? We are dealing with a highly resourced criminal group here. What can we do to help?’
‘Obviously we had a very serious incident in Gorey,’ said Chief Supt Ferry.
‘We have some great lads there that attended the scene and fortunately nobody was injured. There’s a lot of ongoing work behind the scenes on that and we’re still hopeful of a result.’
‘It does, however, highlight the need for numbers we have and we have very proactive members working in the area with a lot of good detections.’