Drink drivers are evading detection while gardaí get bogged down in cumbersome bureaucracy and meticulous court work, according to a retired senior Garda. Former head of the Garda Motorcycle School, retired sergeant Martin Reilly also said that traffic policing is often not prioritised by some senior officers, writes Patrick Logue
Reilly said it can take gardaí up to two hours to "process" a suspected drink driver and gardai also spend long periods of time off the road attending court to give evidence.
"The garda has to be 110 per cent sure that he has crossed every T and dotted every I. Drink driving legislation is the most contested law in the country," Reilly told The Irish Times.
"You have guards up in the district courts being grilled by senior counsel about every single scintilla about what they did with this barrister's client.
"Quite rightly so, but what is the end result? People re-offend and then they're off down the pub boasting about it to their friends."
From the time a garda arrests a suspect to when he or she is back patrolling "could be two hours or perhaps even longer by the time the entire process is completed and all the rights of a prisoner have been observed," Reilly said.
"You are off the road and not doing your real job. So, you are off the road as an enforcer for that period of time. You get back out on patrol, pick up another drunken driver. By the time you have finished that one that could be the end of your shift," Reilly added.
He said he believed drink drivers were getting away undetected because gardaí are tied up with necessary paperwork off the road.
He said traffic corps attached to individual Garda divisions were often severely understaffed because of officers attending court. "Effectively, on any given day you could have the jeep grounded and one or two bikes grounded due to court work. What you might be rolling out on a 2 o'clock to 10 o'clock afternoon shift is two guys on bikes."
Earlier this month the Garda reported an increase of 46 per cent in the number of arrests it made for drink driving over the October bank holiday. The total number of such arrests this year stood at 9,050 at the end of October, an increase of 15 per cent on the same period last year.
However, road fatalities have also increased, now standing at 359, 33 more than for the same period last year.
Reilly believes that traffic enforcement is not always given the priority it should by senior gardai.The Department of Justice recently announced, in the Government's Book of Estimates, that the Garda Traffic Corps would be increased nationally from 530 to 805 in 2006, with a further increase in 2007 to bring the corps to over 1,000 by then.
Some additional overtime provision would go on the traffic corps, which will also see an investment of €3 million on road traffic equipment such as speed cameras.
On the recent appointment of Assistant commissioner Eddie Rock, who is in charge of the national Traffic Corps, Reilly added: "Up to now we have never had an Assistant Commissioner in charge, now we have, so now we have got to see what kind of effect he is having."