Cabinet approves use of stun guns for Garda response unit

The Garda's Emergency Response Unit (ERU) is to begin using stun guns following approval by Cabinet yesterday.

Minister for Justice Michael McDowell has also announced the establishment of primary response teams in all Garda regions outside Dublin. These will be an elite squad who will undergo similar training to the ERU. The regional squads will be used to contain dangerous situations pending the arrival of the response unit.

Recruits will be drawn from public order units around the country. The decision to establish the units comes following a recommendation contained in a recent report by the Garda inspectorate on siege situations.

The inspectorate, which is headed by Chief Inspector Kathleen O'Toole, studied the Barr tribunal report into the shooting dead of John Carthy by gardaí at Abbeylara, Co Longford.

It advanced a range of proposals on how gardaí might better prepare for similar armed incidents in the future. The decision to introduce the stun guns and establish the response teams represents the first recommendations from the inspectorate's report published last month to be acted upon.

The Taser stun guns disable a target by electric shock, thus negating the need to open fire with live ammunition. The ERU has also been given pepper spray, pepper shot and bean-bag shots.

These can be fired at a target, demobilising them but not usually killing them.

Mr McDowell said the new weapons should "as far as humanly possible" prevent deaths such as Mr Carthy's.

"The circumstances under which less lethal weapons could legitimately be used are limited to circumstances where this is necessary to avoid the use of firearms," he said.

Currently, the use of guns was permitted only to repel serious attacks on gardaí, members of the public and property; or in the arrest or re-arrest of persons involved in serious offences.

Strict conditions were laid down, including a requirement that all other means of achieving the objective in question had been exhausted, before firearms could be used.

"The test which currently applies to the use of less lethal weapons, that their use is necessary to avoid the use of firearms, is therefore a high one," Mr McDowell said.