Letter to the Editor: We must take action to make Cork City safer
Having read your article in the Irish Examiner ‘Armed gardaí on the streets’ dating November 9, it has opened my eyes in multiple ways involving how Cork is changing. From reading this article it has shocked me in how my generation of students can think this is acceptable behaviour.
You can have two different views on what has happened by either saying this person who started this incident is either very clever or is an idiot! I feel by him choosing this location outside McDonald’s at 5.30pm was a very clever idea as many escape routes and it would be overcrowded at this time of year but also it is a very popular location.
But then you could say on the other hand this location just could have been an ordinary meeting place for themselves and wasn’t thought out properly that they just chosen a location close to JD Sports but also easy for them to get there.
The consequences of this terrible incident will start labelling my generation as “hoodlums” when only a small handful are the cause of this. Could this incident itself lead onto more attacks on businesses? I feel there will be due to the media attraction and the gardaí stopping it before it could happen. Due to this, this could lead to big businesses like JD Sports, for example, to pack up and relocate to a more safer and healthier environment. Which could lead to in worst scenarios unemployment rates increase, which then could lead to other alarming issues.
We can counteract these issues if there are more gardaí patrolling the streets on feet as sitting in cars is doing nothing about this situation. The ratio of one garda to 427 people stat you had in your article really shocked me as a citizen of this wonderful city.
If we receive more gardaí into this city we can stop future attacks like these and stop our city from getting a bad reputation to becoming a city where we don’t stand idol to this behaviour and show that people and businesses can feel safe.
