A couple of weeks ago a Garda colleague of mine walked out of a courtroom with his name cleared. He had been on a drugs patrol, not far from where Grace Lynch died in Finglas, Dublin, last January, when he saw what he believed was a drug deal involving a youth on an e-scooter. He identified himself. The young person refused to stop and my colleague began pursuing the suspect.
Ultimately, for doing exactly what the public expects a garda to do, he was charged with dangerous driving. The judge acquitted him, but it took the better part of two stress-filled years, with the constant threat of conviction looming over him.
Another colleague wasn’t as lucky. He recently received a two-year driving ban after pursuing masked scrambler riders in the north inner city. I know this man who was acquitted. I stood beside him in court. He is a diligent and conscientious guard.
Unfortunately, these cases are not unusual. Garda Commissioner Justin Kelly recently told the Oireachtas justice committee that there were a further 10 gardaí before the courts for alleged dangerous or careless driving arising from incidents on duty that involved no injuries to the public or themselves.
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Privately, each member will be working out the risk/reward ratio in their heads and an increasing number will conclude that doing their duty simply isn’t worth the aggravation.
On the same day the commissioner gave those figures, Martin and Siobhán Lynch – Grace’s parents – sat before the same committee to speak about their daughter. I have spent time with Martin and Siobhán and I admire their strength and courage more than I can write here. Because of their advocacy, Grace’s Law now explicitly bans scrambler use in public places. But, as they said, “the law means nothing unless it is enforced”.
If an arm of the State is trying to prosecute another arm of the State for trying to enforce existing traffic laws then we can have little confidence any new law will be a success.
I have spent nearly 25 years in the “K” District of An Garda Síochána’s Dublin Metropolitan Region (DMR) West division. The issue of unlicensed, uninsured scrambler-style motorbikes is countrywide, but is more acute in densely urbanised areas such as these. I’ve watched these machines arrive on our roads far faster than the legal infrastructure can keep up with them.
People lump scramblers, e-scooters and e-bikes together, but the risks are very different, so some categorisation would be helpful.
Scramblers are the worst. They are high-powered, noisy machines, built for off-road conditions and ridden mostly by young men and teenage boys. This cohort lives by two mantras. The first is the “buzz”. The buzz almost always means illegality, tearing around estates and fields, pulling wheelies (the longer the wheelie, the better the “buzz”). The second mantra always happens when one of them is caught or a machine is seized, namely “I don’t give a f**k”.
E-scooters are the next category. In K District they have become the favoured tool of young people dealing drugs and general antisocial behaviour. They are fast, quiet and usually out of sight before a patrol car has time to turn around.
E-bikes are a third, lesser category – the vehicle of choice for the food delivery rider. These are nominally bicycles, but capable of moped speeds once illegally modified.
All must be regulated by a police force that is inhibited from doing so in a robust and consistent manner. Enforcement tools such as driver training, updated tactical instructions and thorough legal protection are not there. Garda management is trying to address this by seizing scramblers out of sheds and gardens, which is effective up to a point; but one seizure only removes one machine.
These motorised urban “terrorists” can act with impunity because – to be clear – not one member of An Garda Síochána is trained to pursue them. Not one. Indeed, they are not even trained to pursue a car, never mind a scrambler or an e-scooter. There isn’t any specialist pursuit unit in the pipeline, either. There are two Garda driving schools and one competency-based driving model for the organisation. Pursuit driving is covered by neither the schools nor the model and the trainers haven’t been trained in the practical application of the pursuit policy.
In his evidence to the justice committee, Kelly said 75 per cent of requests to pursue are authorised by control.
And when one of these pursuits ends badly, who stands before the court? Not the senior officer who gave verbal authorisation. It’s the driver, often a recent recruit to the force. This is something equivalent to a forklift operator on day one of his career being given the keys to a forklift and a bulky manual as the only form of on-the-job training. But of course, this would never happen with a forklift driver because there are stringent EU-wide safety standards.
In the UK, no officer is permitted to pursue unless trained and accredited.
This, as with so many other An Garda Síochána issues, is a legacy issue. Kelly has inherited a situation in which the absence of pursuit training was neither acknowledged nor addressed for years. A rebranded policy – “managed containment” – was offered instead of training.
My colleagues and I welcome Kelly’s commitment to begin organisation-wide training. That should mean a national pursuit-training programme, a clear tactical framework, use of the latest technology, a State-backed pursuit licence and statutory indemnity for gardaí acting proportionately, in good faith and in line with their role.
As things stand, the complaints process is being weaponised by the very people who use scramblers illegally. They cynically exploit the system to make complaints when something goes wrong, which is how a garda can find him or herself in the dock.
High-level discussions involving Government leaders and the Garda Commissioner have now led to a decision on Monday to ban e-scooters for under-18s amid concerns about the number of children who have been hospitalised with traumatic injuries. There will be no outright ban for now, though it remains on the table.
Whatever is decided, however, must acknowledge that thousands of these machines are already on our roads and footpaths. If they are declared illegal there will be yet further expectation on frontline gardaí to intervene. That drags us straight back to the balance between the personal risk of intervening and the duty to intervene. Every new prohibition, regulation or legislative provision that sends untrained gardaí into fast‑moving encounters with e-scooters and scramblers makes that balance all the more precarious.
Martin and Siobhán Lynch have done their part at a cost no family should have to bear. My colleagues want to honour Grace’s name by making the law work in practice. That means training gardaí properly and protecting them when they act proportionately. Until these fundamentals are in place, we will continue to see unfortunate gardaí sitting on benches with known criminals, waiting for their cases to be heard in court.
Mark Ferris is a detective garda in Blanchardstown and the Garda Representation Association’s central executive committee representative for DMR West
