Staff shortage hits gardaí at fully equipped new station
Gardaí based at the busy station claim they have no designated community policing unit, don’t liaise with schools and conduct little beat work because of a manpower shortage.
Gardaí at the station, which is the headquarters for the district, said they were struggling to keep up with the growth of new ethnic communities in the town. They said a small minority of these were getting into trouble with the law, particularly in relation to drink-driving.
One garda claimed half of the drink drivers were foreign nationals.
The claims were made in an article on the Longford Garda Station, published in the Garda Review, the official journal of the Garda Representative Association (GRA).
“It is a fantastic station here. It is a big station and it is now full,” Garda Donal Madden told the magazine. “We have the best of equipment here, we have two new cars and a motorcycle, and we have two mountain bikes and storage space. Yet, we have no people to run all of these things.”
He said the station had lost its drug unit and had no designated community policing unit. “We have two members on mountain bikes, but in reality they attend no meetings and there is no liaison with schools.”
He said the station’s ethnic liaison officer was also the acting district clerk. “It is rare that she would have a day to proactively work with the ethnic community.”
Garda Madden added: “All of this is down to manpower levels.”
He said members were reluctant to do overtime as it added to their paperwork, which was constantly building up.
“Numbers of gardaí are small here, so students would find themselves out in the patrol car a lot. There is not much beat work because of the size of the regular units.”
Gardaí said the language barrier was a problem in their dealings with foreign nationals.
“It is very difficult to interview or interrogate anyone through an interpreter. You lose the flow completely; they probably understand the question but they get extra time through their interpreter,” said Detective Garda Keelan Brennan.
Det Sergeant Donnie Sweeney said they had a large population of foreign nationals and that “a few” had fallen by the wayside.
Garda Denise Dockery of the Divisional Traffic Unit said: “Half of our drink drivers are foreign nationals.
“It’s not just confined to weekends; they drink a lot during the week as well. It is a huge problem.”
GRA vice-president Chris Lee, an executive member for Longford/Westmeath, said Longford was a microcosm of the policing needs across the country.
