Bank Holiday weekends are usually accompanied by renewed appeals around road safety.
Last Thursday afternoon, a joint An Garda and Road Safety Authority press release was issued noting that on “one of the busiest weekends on the roads” that gardaí would be “out in force . . . with extra checkpoints and considerably more enforcement in relation to speeding, mobile phone use, and seatbelts.”
At almost the same time, the Garda oversight agency, the Policing and Community Safety Authority (PCSA) was reporting that some frontline gardaí working in roads policing were openly “hostile” towards doing their jobs.
This finding is contained within an as yet unpublished report into roads policing from external consultants Crowe which was commissioned following concerns raised by anonymous garda working in that area.
The report also found some senior Garda members were “afraid” to intervene when gardaí they were managing persistently underperformed.
Elaine Byrne, head of the PCSA described as “shocking” the way some gardaí openly expressed their lack of interest in doing their jobs to the personnel who were reviewing roads policing.
Outgoing commissioner Drew Harris said a substantial number, though still a minority, of the gardaí engaged in roads policing were “brazen” about expressing their disinterest in their jobs and their hostility towards carrying out their basic duties.
He said Crowe consultants had been commissioned to carry out the roads policing review after he received anonymous correspondence from a garda working in roads policing.
Roads Policing duties include enforcing road traffic laws, performing speed checks, detecting people driving dangerously or using mobile phones and conducting checkpoints to detect intoxicated drivers.
The challenge for the incoming Garda Commissioner Justin Kelly is this is the second deeply problematic roads policing issue to arise in just a few years.
In 2017, following reporting in this newspaper, it was revealed that some gardaí were fabricating roadside breathtests in order to inflate their productivity.
The scale was breathtaking.
External consultants Crowe Horwath carried out a detailed report into the “fake breath tests” and found that a minimum 1.5 million, and likely 1.9 million, of the 3.5 million breath tests recorded on the Garda Pulse system over seven years to 2017 never happened.
One of the many challenges this debacle raised for Garda management is why it took so long for this issue to emerge?
Ever rising breath-test productivity, at a time when the then Roads Policing Unit was facing resource challenges, was unquestioned by the Garda management or the Department of Justice, a report carried out for the Policing Authority found.
Concerns raised publicly by the former Road Safety Authority chair Gay Byrne, who in 2014 complained about the lack of visible policing in relation to drink driving, were shouted down.
When the problem did finally emerge it was because the soaring number of breathtests recorded on Pulse could not be reconciled with the number of single use breathtest mouthpieces ordered for use at roadside checkpoints.
For Mr Kelly, a highly respected and apparently well-liked senior officer among the rank and file, among the issues on his burgeoning “to do list” when he takes on his new role in September is to ensure the effective management of and reporting on roads policing, and responding to emerging issues quickly.
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