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John Lyons is the Independent Left councillor on Dublin City Council for Artane–Whitehall.
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I want to talk about a scandal.
Actually, it’s not so much a scandal, it’s not even a scandal about a scandal, it’s a scandal about a scandal about a scandal. A third order scandal, if you like.
The first order scandal is about how gardaí handle 999 calls, or more accurately, don’t handle them. an inquiry, led by Assistant Commissioner Barry O’Brien examined several thousand 999 emergency calls about domestic violence in the two-year period, finding that about half of these calls were cancelled when they should not have been.
Basically, what happened was that someone rang 999, the operator asked what service, fire, ambulance or gardaí, and because they witnessed a crime, or were witnessing a crime or were the victim of a crime they asked for the gardaí, and were put through, and the garda who answered the phone typed into his computer system the details of what the caller reported. They typed it into their computer, that’s important, I’ll get back to that in a moment.
Then the garda had to make a decision. They had to decide to send a hoard of officer in a fleet vehicles, backed up by the armed response unit, and the garda helicopter; or they had to decide whether to send a patrol car, or an officer on foot, or to inform the local station to check up on something when they got the time.
Given that these were all 999 calls, the bulk of these situations probably didn’t need a helicopter and the ARU, but they were certainly at the upper end of the seriousness scale.
But that decision, in half the cases, in HALF the cases that decision was to do nothing. Just to cancel the record in the garda computer system, and have no further action taken by any garda, just tick the entry off as completed.
In just two years, 22,000 calls labelled as priority one were, in the delicate terms of the policing authority cancelled for invalid reasons. 2,000 of these were domestic violence cases.
If that happened once, that would be a scandal in any normal society. But it didn’t happen once, it happened more than 2,000 times in two years; some woman was having the lard beaten out of her by a drunken partner, managed to get to her phone and dial 999, and the jobsworth on 80 grand a year who picked up the phone at the other end didn’t think that it was worth interrupting their snack box to do anything about it. That happens three times a day, every day of the year.
Bear in mind that what was examined was only priority one domestic violence calls that were actually entered in the computer system. If you have faith that there isn’t a whole other set of calls that these idle, feckless, callous incompetents never even bothered to input into their computer, then god bless your innocence.
So that is a scandal. Half – HALF – of the calls that actually were input in the computer system were cancelled without a single attempt by any garda to get off their fat backside and actually do the job that they are so richly paid to do.
That’s a scandal. But it’s not the scandal I’m talking about here.
Because when this was investigated by the Policing Authority – that’s the job of the Policing Authority – the gardaí did everything they could to block the investigation, to such an extent that their chairman Bob Collins said attempts to get information from Gardai caused him “significant concern” and “fairly intense frustration” – those are direct quotes of his words.
Basically, when the Policing Authority got wind of this, they wanted the information to assess how big and how widespread the problem is, and senior gardaí closed ranks and flat-out refused to hand over information that would allow the Policing Authority to do its work.
The Irish Times reported Mr Collins expressing “his own and the authority’s acute disappointment and intense frustration that information in the possession of and immediately available to the Garda Síochána had not been and was not being provided to the authority”.
You have to know the measured tone of civil servant-speak to understand just what a rebuke this. Turf wars are pretty commonplace in the public sector, but they are normally expressed in battles over pretty mundane things, and almost never get any press attention, and when they rarely do, it is unheard of for one civil servant to go on the record explicitly criticising another.
So, this scathing criticism, explicitly accusing senior gardaí of covering up what is at best gross malpractice, and quite possibly criminal corruption, this takes some beating. Needless to say, that it is an extremely serious scandal.
But that’s not the scandal that I’m talking about, that cover-up is a secondary scandal. I’m more interested in the third-order scandal.
That scandal, is that nobody has been fired. This scandal has been know for months to garda top brass, and according to a story by John Mooney in last weekend’s Sunday Times, the gardaí who cancelled thousands of are still on the job, on the same job. The story says, quote, “Garda headquarters has not transferred any officers or garda staff implicated in the emerging 999 call scandal from their positions.”
Even that story says a lot about how we deal with incompetence and corruption in Ireland. The only issue that arises is transferring these louts to another cushy job. The idea of firing, or even suspending them is not even considered.
And I’m not focussing primarily on the jobsworths supposed to take the phone calls here. I’m primarily outraged at the senior gardaí, who, in the words of Bob Collins, had information immediately available in their possession that would have assisted his investigation, and flatly refused to hand it over.
In any normal democracy a police officer protecting corrupt and incompetent officers like that should expect to be fired on the spot. But this has been going on for months, and they haven’t been fired, not then and not since. There isn’t even any political discussion about sanctions against this type of outrageous behaviour. That’s the real scandal here. The only comment is that the information will be provided ‘in the coming months’, nobody is even discussing punishing the offenders.
That is, as I said a third order scandal, but it’s the root of the problem; we have endemic corruption in many Irish institutions, An Garda Síochána probably being first among them, and the fact that we’re not even having a conversation about firing and prosecuting the senior officers who are facilitating that corruption is the reason why we have that corruption.
And that’s the real scandal.
