The Hands of the Gardai are tied

Politicians making announcements is irrelevant. Their role is to enact legislation.

The role of the courts is to interpret the legislation.

The role of the gardai is to enforce the legislation.

The problem with the Gardai is that they are a political force, and act on the whims and directions of under qualified spoofers who occupy political positions at any given time.

They operate a status quo where the managers within the “force” will never criticize the politicians and the politicians will never tell the garda that they need to take the finger out and they all take home big paychecks to big houses.

Its policing by optics, its carefully coordinated media driven national slow down days, its PR published figures of drink drivers caught at Christmas.

The negative stuff like unanswered calls and deleted tickets only becomes public when a whistleblower has the courage to stand up. This information should always be publicly available

The gardai need to be separated from the government, their management needs to be held to account at mandatory oireacthas style publicly available questioning by those politicians in power and in opposition.

Currently the focus of the gardai is whatever the politicians feel it should be, the current flavour of the month is probably drop everything and be visible in dublin city, and here is €10 mil in overtime to smooth that over, to hell with whatever else you were doing, just get out there because votes and ministerial pensions are at stake.

Like an oireachtas committee on justice and equality?

There’s also the role of the judiciary with lenient sentencing- letting the scrotes back on the streets, which suits the solicitors and barristers who know said scrote will act up again and the solicitor will get the call to represent again (and get paid for their time).

It’s a financial merry go round in the courts- no wonder the guards are demoralised.

The target for crime should be set at zero. Do you want to set it higher than zero?