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JUSTICE MINISTER HELEN McEntee has said that granting powers of arrest for a proposed public transport police has to yet be “explored”.
The draft Programme for Government was published yesterday afternoon and it pledges to create a “Transport Security Force” under the National Transport Authority.
This force would operate and have similar powers to the Airport Police and Customs officers.
The programme for government adds that the new Transport Security Force would “play a central role on Dublin public transport”.
McEntee said that while gardaí already carry out “specific operations on public transport”, the government has “agreed to have something similar to what you have in our airport”.
When asked if the officers on public transport would have powers of arrest, McEntee said “this has to be explored”.
Speaking on RTÉ’s Morning Ireland, McEntee acknowledged that there are “limited powers of arrest for those who are in the airport”.
McEntee asaid that the government wants to establish a transport security force “while at the same time expanding our Garda workforce and making sure we have as strong a presence as possible, not just on public transport, but right across the country”.
And when pressed on why it took so long to include the creation of a public transport police in a programme for government, McEntee said:
“We’d like to do everything at once when we’re in government, but you can’t do everything at once.
“What you can do is make progress and I believe that we have made progress, whether it’s in Garda numbers, developing stations, opening new stations in our capital city.”
Public transport workers have previously called for the introduction of a dedicated transport police to deal with anti-social behaviour.
Trade union SIPTU welcomed the inclusion of a new transport security force in the draft programme for government.
SIPTU’s transport division organiser Adrian Kane said union representatives will be “seeking an early meeting with the incoming Minister for Transport to ensure this commitment is a top priority for the Government”.
He said anti-social behaviour and violence on the public transport network has “intensified since the pandemic”.
SIPTU Sector Organiser John Murphy said that making the plan “a reality must now be the key aim of all stakeholders in the public transport sector”.
Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have clashed over the issue, with the former strongly supporting the idea.
It is understood that transport police will be separate to gardaí, but Fianna Fáil sources were keen to state that a Garda unit that is currently seen on public transport on occasions will continue and they will be tasked with covering larger areas also.
Sources say they intend for the new transport security to have similar powers as customs officers and airport police, stating that they will be “authorised officers” under the National Transport Authority.
It is understood that the intention is to give them the power of arrest, though it has not been made clear whether this needs to be achieved through legislation
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In fairness I very rarely have issues with Vodafone broadband.
@John Sheahan: me either. Had a short outage in County Wex earlier. It’s back now.
Vodafone are brilliant. 1 minor issue and the big spoilt boys and girls have a melt down because they can’t watch the toyshow. FFS, if that’s your biggest issue then life ain’t 1/2 bad.
@Santa: totally agree, very rarely are there any issues with their service
@Santa: Minor issue? I was an hour on h old waiting for customer service during which my 2 kids were asking every 5 minutes when will the WiFi be back. I was a Virgin media customer and never had these problems.
@Bramer: what a life and death situation you were in I hope things worked out for you with this serious first world problem
@Bramer: yes its minor and the more people who ring them the longer their response times.
Just don’t bother with the RTE player. Awful app but the adds play perfectly.
@tottkingham: vpn mate. No ads. Works beautifully along with bbc iPlayer all 4 and itv, netflix most radio players to on your phone.
Do yourself a favor. Vpn.
@De Green Parrot: which vpn app do you use?
@tottkingham: or use brave. Best out of the box ad blocking browser.
Absolutely shocking service from Vodafone tonight. But to be honest very poor service from them in general recently. After 20 years I’m Seriously considering whether or not to continue with this crowd of changers
@Johnny Casey: I think one outage or issue in 20 years is fairly good service, no?
@Johnny Casey: are you having a meltdown because you’re going to miss late late toy show
@Mary OGorman McGuire: I spent three weeks without my broadband. They sent an engineer to check the outside line TWICE in a week to check the outside line and the line into the house. Booth times he told them lines were fine, faulty modem. Took my parent modem (as I needed it for work) which worked perfectly, then spent another 6weeks arguing to get a new modem sent. I wouldn’t call that great!! My modem was 5 yrs old. Hardly required about 50 phone calls and paying an engineer for two visits (who looked completely baffled on his second visit)
@Johnny Casey: yeah, frequent outages here recently too, affecting my ability to work.
@Johnny Casey: with them 20 plus years, to be fair these situations don’t happen very often with Vodafone and I live in an area with no broadband only Wi-Fi
@Johnny Casey: get on digiweb. Vodafone is a joke.
@De Green Parrot: Dodgyweb are rubbish, those Fritzbox routers are a joke along with their support, logged a business support call and still waiting for a response. Its far longer now than the 72 hours they claim and they have ignored subsequent update requests.
Its back working so they did their job much thanks.
With them 4 years, this is the first issue I’ve had with them, siht happens though doesn’t it? Some serious First World Problem people on the Vodafone Twitter account today! It’s grand now again anyway.
If you’re able to, change your DNS settings in your router to something like Google’s: 8.8.8.8 for primary and 8.8.1.1 for secondary. If you don’t know how to do this then wait for Vodafone to resolve the issue I guess. This fixed it for me though.
@Limited Edition: I changed to 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4
Works fine…. Though connections slightly slower.
Did anyone actually read the 2nd last sentence? Lol
@Frank Flanagan: wait until you read the 23rd, it’s a doozy
I’m with them over 20 years and outages happen but very rarely!
Now it makes sense! In fairness generally super service from Vodafone!
Well mine keeps dropping every hour during work so it’s not the best but at least it has very few outages.
We were out for a couple of hours, but in fairness this is 1st time having a problem
@яα¢нєℓ: 5 yrs using Vodafone TV & Internet. three outages, one pre-notification email sent for 6 hr outage (was back in 4 ) 3 years ago. One this Tues for 1hr and the longer one today. Generally very good service, have used in 2 households (we carried our service over/ seamless transfer)
Change your DNS server to 8.8.8.8 on your device, that will fix it until Vodafone resolve it. Don’t forget to set back to auto after Vodafone fix it.
They had a deadline and hit it so fair play. Would have been a disaster otherwise. I’m with VM and I was without internet for about 5 days recently and I work from home. No other option where I’m living.
I had vodafone gigabit broadband installed yesterday, only started the contract today so I was thinking crap, I shouldn’t have changed providers. I read through the instructions and, I guess as well as the outage today, the guy that installed the fibre used the wrong cable from the router to the modem. Great first impression.
@Laura Halpenny: I just got rid of vodafone gigabit. Every night between 7-11 The speed dropped to 10mb from 1000. Foght my way out of the contract only with them for 2 months. Anyway. With digiweb now. All good. But never again will I go near vodafone. Weeks of telling them the same story and they keep telling me it’s on my end.
@Laura Halpenny: The gigabit service is SIRO. the modem is installed at wall at entry to the fibre cable and has a separate power cable that plugs in to closest socket. Its a standard LAN cable connecting that to the router. Amazing they messed that up
@De Green Parrot: Are you an ad for digiweb?
@John Murray: hi john…I looked at the instructions after and for the gigabit one you have to install the WAN cable from the LAN port on the router – he should’ve read the instructions- I did lol
I received a call from Vodafone customer service yesterday to send me out a brand new Huawei P40 pro, they just wanted me to call out my IBAN number to them over the phone before they could send it on to me..
They sent me a text while talking to verify its them…what does anyone think of this ?
I don’t have sky so while internet down stuck with rte
Ppl still use Vodafone?
Seriously, why?
Can’t complain about Vodafone never had problem before tonight.
have your say