Crowe asks parents not to buy scramblers for kids this Christmas

Sinn Féin TD for Dublin South West Seán Crowe has urged parents not to buy scramblers for their children this Christmas.

Crowe raised issues such as scramblers and drug intimidation with Garda Commissioner Drew Harris at a meeting of the local Joint Policing Committee on Friday.

He said that scramblers pose a danger to communities across due to the dangers they pose in built-up areas “to both users and the general public.”

“I am appealing to parents not to buy scramblers for their children this Christmas. They pose enormous risks in built-up areas to both users and the general public. They’re not toys, but machines better suited to farmwork than tearing through and menacing our estates.”

Crowe said “I had the opportunity to put questions directly to Garda Commissioner Drew Harris at a meeting of the local Joint Policing Committee in County Hall this morning. I spoke to him on issues such as the misuse of scramblers and the rampant levels of drug intimidation that we are seeing locally.”

“The Commissioner was able to give me a number of figures on the number of seizures of both drugs and scramblers since the new year, but what he couldn’t tell me was the level of impact this is having in the local community.

“There are still plenty of scrambler bikes tearing through our communities, usually in pairs. There was a pair that went past my local shops at midday and one of them was doing a wheely in front of oncoming traffic,” he noted.

Crowe said he raised the “ever-present problem” of drug intimidation that goes on outside shops and supermarkets.

“While the Commissioner talked about youth diversion programmes, which I welcome as a means of preventing crime from worsening in the future, we need to know what gardaí will actually do in our community today,” he said.