Report indicates ‘brazen’ disregard for roads policing duties, Commissioner says

Some gardai have shown a “brazen” disregard for roads policing duties, according to a “sobering” unpublished report.

Garda Commissioner Drew Harris said he received an anonymous report before commissioning an examination of how roads policing operations are carried out.

The findings of that examination have been described as “shocking” by Mr Harris and the chairwoman of the Policing and Community Safety Authority, Elaine Byrne.

She said the authority received the report in June, and said it found some members showed a “blatant disregard” for their job while they knew their actions were being reviewed.

“They were openly hostile to doing their job,” she said in what she described as a “wake-up call” for An Garda Siochana.

“There are members within roads policing who seem very much disinterested in their job, and this is something that we are concerned about in terms of performance of individual guards, and it’s something that the previous authority have looked upon, and the current authority would have concerns about the absence of performance management within the Gardai,” she said after a meeting of the authority.

She said the authority was also “shocked” at a “fear” of performance management within the Gardai.

She urged the Garda Commissioner to publish the report in due course, which Mr Harris said they would do once they ensured no one is identifiable.

“What I’ll undertake to do is we just do one final read through the report. I just want to be sure nobody’s identifiable, and then we can issue the report,” he said.

“It did arise from anonymous correspondence that I received, obviously from a roads policing member and although anonymous, it had certainly a ring of authenticity about that.”

He said he then asked for an examination of the work done by roads policing members and a working group is going through various recommendations.

“The reason this is important is there’s been a lot of focus on roads policing numbers, but also obviously, then the impact of enforcement on road deaths and seriously injured.

“It’s sobering to say the least in terms of its conclusions.”