Calls for 'immediate' cuts would hit Garda overtime for gangland policing
Garda Commissioner Drew Harris has been handed a budgetary nightmare with the organisation more than €30m in the red and Garda HQ warning that “corrective action” must be taken “immediately”.
The latest Commissioner’s report shows that up to €25m of the overspend is due to overtime and related costs.
After just a day in the job, the new commissioner faces a mounting headache, knowing that cutting overtime would impact on crucial preventative and investigative policing, including operations against feuding gangs.
In a separate, but related, warning, the report said investment needed to be put in place to deal with three “critical” policing and security areas — infrastructure, personnel and technology — to deal with the possibility of a ‘hard’ Brexit.
Mr Harris was sworn into office early yesterday, just after midnight, becoming the first person to have served in a foreign police force to head An Garda Síochána. The 53-year-old former deputy chief constable of the PSNI is the third commissioner in four years.
The main garda staff associations welcomed his appointment and praised one of his first actions, which was to tour the streets of Dublin’s north inner city and chat to members on the ground.
However, the new Garda chief has been presented with the stark financial situation confronting the force.
The Commissioner’s report for July 2018 was compiled by his office under his predecessor, acting commissioner Dónall Ó Cualáin, now retired.
The report, sent to the Policing Authority, said the force had overspent €31.1m in the first seven months.
This continuing trend of excess expenditure is very concerning as the Vote [budget] is in serious danger of exceeding budget,” it said.
“Corrective action across all subheads which are recording excess expenditure must be implemented immediately.”
It said €58.4m has been spent on overtime, €14.8m in excess of the budget. In addition, overtime expenditure at the Garda College was €0.7m over budget.
In addition, travel and subsistence, in part driven by additional overtime, as well as training and development and garda maintenance was €9.5m in excess of budget. This meant, in total, the force was up to €25m in the red through overtime, related costs and training.
John Jacob, general secretary of the Association of Garda Sergeants and Inspectors, said this presented the new commissioner with a number of predicaments.
“Under current garda numbers, preventative policing, particularly in Dublin in tackling gangland, is done through overtime,” he said. “If the commissioner wants to maintain that he will have to spend on overtime.
Likewise, our investigative capacity is through overtime as young gardaí don’t have the skills and knowledge for investigative work. So, if you want to reduce overtime, you will have to reduce investigative and preventative policing.
Mr Jacob also said that if you train members they have to be covered by others, incurring overtime. But he noted every year the gardaí have to seek supplementary budgets and said Commissioner Harris would now be expected to make that case.
The report also shows recorded violent property crime is up 7% in the first half of this year, with notable increases in robberies and aggravated burglaries.
