THEY’LL BE clearing space in the trophy cabinet at the Phoenix Park headquarters this weekend after An Garda Síochána gained dubious international recognition by winning an award at the annual Ig Nobel ceremony in the US.
The force was honoured in the literature category for the 50 driving tickets that were issued last year to a Mr Prawo Jazdy – the Polish for “driving licence”.
Held at Harvard University on Thursday, the "alternative Nobels" are awarded for "achievements that first make people laugh, then make them think", according to the Annals of Improbable Research, a satirical science magazine that organises the event.
Prizes were also presented for a bra that can be turned into a gas mask for two people, research into the effects of an empty beer bottle versus a full beer bottle on the human head and proof that cows with names give more milk than their nameless counterparts.
Many of the winners attended the ceremony, where they received their awards from a real Nobel laureate, but the Garda’s prize was accepted by Karolina Lewestam, “a Polish citizen and holder of a Polish driver’s licence”, organisers said.
She “expressed her good wishes to the Irish police service”.
The Irish Timesreported earlier this year that an individual named "Prawo Jazdy" had clocked up more than 50 entries for road traffic offences in the Garda's Pulse system.
When a traffic division officer investigated, he found “Prawo Jazdy” was Polish for “driving licence”, requiring the force to change its computer system and send notices to Garda stations alerting them to the error.
“Prawo Jazdy is actually the Polish for driving licence and not the first and surname on the licence,” the officer wrote in a memo.
“Having noticed this I decided to check on Pulse and see how many members have made this mistake. It is quiet [sic] embarrassing to see that the system has created Prawo Jazdy as a person with over 50 identities.”
Prizes were awarded in 10 categories on Thursday night. The public health prize went to Elena Bodnar of Hinsdale, Illinois, and colleagues who designed and patented a bra that can be quickly converted into a pair of gas masks – one for the wearer and one to be given to some needy bystander.
Pathologist Stephan Bolliger and colleagues at the University of Bern in Switzerland won in the peace category for a research project to determine whether an empty beer bottle does more or less damage to the human skull than a full one in a bar fight.
The physics prize went to three US-based academics for analytically determining why pregnant women don’t tip over.
Donald Unger, a doctor in California, was honoured for a lifelong experiment in which he cracked the knuckles of his left hand but never his right for more than 60 years to prove that cracking your knuckles does not cause arthritis.
The economics prize was shared by the directors, executives and auditors of four Icelandic banks, for showing that “tiny banks can be rapidly transformed into huge banks and vice versa – and for demonstrating that similar things can be done to an entire national economy”.
When contacted about the literature prize yesterday, a Garda spokesman said: “We’re aware of it, but we’re not in a position to comment.”
