It is the public that will suffer most as a result of a recruitment embargo and other cutbacks in An Garda Siochána, the annual conference of Garda sergeants and inspectors has heard.
President of the Association of Garda Sergeants and Inspectors (AGSI) Paschal Feeney said any sergeant or inspector in the country would be able to tell of reductions in personnel to send to house calls, to detail for traffic duty, or to allocate to a community policing unit.
“Worse still is the lack of personnel to staff the public order units at weekends to deal with the street rows after the pubs and discos close.”
Mr Feeney told the annual conference in Athlone, Co Westmeath there the embargo on recruitment, appointments and promotions had taken the force “back in time to the 1980s” .
Such embargos, he said, would have the same result now as they had then – dramatically reducing the service to the public.
“The situation I have outlined is already bleak now – it will get much, much worse as units have to work without supervision and as fewer and fewer personnel become available to provide the service to the public because recruitment has been stopped.”
Mr Feeney said over 40 per cent of the members of An Garda Síochána had less than five years service and that the proportion of younger, more inexperienced members, to the more mature members and supervisors was growing.
“There are fewer and fewer guiding hands available to keep our younger members on the right path. This is an extremely worrying trend, has already led to problems and will lead to more.”
Mr Feeney said gardaí had also been “hammered” in recent months by the income levy, a pensions levy and a 25 per cent cut in travel and subsistence.
The imposition of these levies and the other cutbacks was severe on all members, but were “doubly severe on our younger members who may have set up a home and started a family in recent years”.
He said he did not detract from the suffering in the private sector, and that his members had a “great deal of sympathy” for those who had lost their jobs and those who had been put on short-time working or reduced pay.
“There is a difference however in that most of those in the public service – I except of course the frontline services like the fire brigades, the nurses and the prison officers – do not come in face-to-face contact with violence and criminality on a daily basis. It is we in the Garda Síochána who do that, and particularly our frontline members in the regular units.
“It is we who police the streets and roads of our country. It is we who operate the traffic corps vehicles which attempt to reduce our tragically high road death rates by curbing the activities of suicidal and homicidal drivers who persist in breaking the speed limits and by driving carelessly and dangerously.
"It is the frontline gardaí in the regular units, allied with the special units, who attempt to limit the activities of the subversive groups who are sadly and tragically still with us and who persist in their murderous and lunatic ways.”
He said the gardaí were also at the frontline in the “war on drugs”.
He called on Minister for Justice Dermot Ahern to remove the new Government levies from payments for what he said was compulsory overtime.
Mr Feeney said overtime was “part of the income” of some gardaí and a “bit of a media football”. But he said that in many instances, the job could not function without it.
“It is appalling that, after being ordered to perform overtime, members are now being doubly penalised by having the income levy and the pensions levy deducted from their overtime payments. No wonder most members do not want to work overtime and must be directed to do so.”
Mr Feeney noted that the Minister for Finance must sanction any exceptions to the current moratorium on recruitment, appointments and promotions in the public service.
He said this was a “disgraceful break” with the past and a “serious reduction” in the operational responsibilities of the Garda Commissioner.
“With a stroke of the pen the operational responsibility for appointments and promotions has been removed from the Garda Commissioner and transferred to the Minister for Finance.”
Mr Feeney said this established “an unwise precedent in extending political control directly into who runs the Garda organisation and I have no doubt it will eventually lead to accusations of political interference and jobbery”.
He asked the Minister to have this moratorium removed “in so far as it affects the Garda organisation”.
Criticising “greed” in the financial sector, Mr Feeney said there had been failure on the part of the financial regulators and the Central Bank.
He said if current laws were not strong enough to tackle alleged fraud in the banking industry then the Government “should consult with the Garda Fraud Squad and with the CAB to ensure that any new laws enacted are effective and that they act to cure this cancer in our financial affairs”.
Mr Feeney said gangland crime and associated murders was rising on a “weekly, if not a daily basis”.
“The subversive threat is rising again as these lunatic criminals take lives at will because that is all they do. They have no life-giving or positive message for us and all they bring is destruction and death.
"These people cannot be fought without resources and I issue this stark warning now – if the Garda Síochána is forced to fight these people with one hand – and possibly two - tied behind our backs then we are sailing into very dangerous waters indeed. The safety of the members, and of the public, must not be compromised in any cutbacks and I ask the Minister to consider this message long and seriously.”
Mr Feeney questioned why the Garda union had been refused permission to affiliate to the Irish Congress of Trade Unions and that it had not even been told why. He said it was currently preparing a third application under the Freedom of Information Act to extract the information.
The AGSI slogan for this year’s conference is 'Protect the Service to the Public'.