GRA on false breath tests: ‘Our members will not be scapegoated for ill-considered policies’
Rank-and-file gardai have blamed the scandal of 1.5 million bogus breath tests on the force's management.
In a hard-hitting response to the controversy, the Garda Representative Association (GRA) said no one can categorically say that the false numbers were only concocted by uniformed and low-ranking officers.
The full version: GRA spokesperson John O'Keeffe's interview with RTÉ Crime Correspondent Paul Reynolds over breathalyser data controversy pic.twitter.com/74XKy5157C
— RTÉ News (@rtenews) September 14, 2017
The organisation said the demands for data on drink-driving were a crude measure of productivity and it claimed this fed into a culture of competition for promotion among the senior ranks.
The GRA said rank-and-file officers got little or no training and that the recording process was obviously flawed.
"It is clear in the report that Garda management do not wish to be blamed for this debacle - but it is entirely of their own making," the GRA said in a statement.
"Their obsession with data collection, for no clear and distinct purpose, while our members were issued with endless directives at a time of under-resourcing, no training, increased workloads and an unclear system of collation was a policy of failure.
"Our members will not be scapegoated for ill-considered policies - and this should be the focus of political attention.
"If the people of Ireland have been let down; then it is in the management and deployment of scant resources to appease the need for purposeless data by those in power."
An internal audit into the gross exaggeration of breath tests found 1,458,221 bogus drink and drug-driving checks from 2009 to 2016.
Some 3,498,400 tests were recorded on the Garda's internal Pulse computer system, but only 2,040,179 were carried out.
The scale of the scandal was revealed a few days before Noirin O'Sullivan announced her retirement as commissioner.
It was the latest in a long line of controversies and allegations that dogged the former police chief's time at the helm. Other big issues included the treatment of whistleblowers, financial irregularities in the Templemore training college and inaccurate crime and homicide statistics.
Ms O'Sullivan retired last Sunday claiming the job of commissioner was about responding to an unending cycle of accountability for past mistakes rather than getting on with reforming the force.
Her predecessor Martin Callinan also retired suddenly.
The GRA said it had questions to ask over why Garda management wanted so much data on "negative breath tests" when Garda resources were scarce or diminishing.
The organisation also claimed that it blew the whistle on bogus crime statistics.
It said it exposed the practice of crime figures being massaged downwards and that it was subsequently vindicated by the Garda Siochana Inspectorate and the Central Statistics Office (CSO).
The CSO last week refused to publish the latest round of crime statistics provided by the Garda.
It had previously stopped publishing the reports in 2014 after the Garda Inspectorate raised concerns that some numbers were inaccurate. It had resumed publishing in the middle of 2015.
The latest refusal centres on warnings from Garda data analysts that homicide figures are incorrect.
At its conference in 2013 then-GRA president John Parker warned that a new reporting system rolled out over the previous two years allowed crime data to be easily massaged.
He warned that there was anecdotal evidence from officers about incidents being miss-classified or unrecorded because no formal statement was made or because an offence was attempted but abandoned.
