Limerick gardaí taken off streets to police Shell pipeline protests

GARDAÍ have had to be taken from Limerick and other urban centres to help police protests over the Shell gas pipeline in Mayo.

Up to 150 gardaí were needed daily at the Rossport site when protesters were active and numbers were increased to 250 on certain days.

Garda commissioner Fachtna Murphy told the Dáil’s public accounts committee that the overtime, travel and subsistence costs involved totalled €11.1 million since protests began in 2005.

The operation also cost the force in other ways. “We have had to bring people from Dublin, Cork and Limerick. Naturally enough it would have an effect on the number of people we would have policing the areas from where they were drawn,” said the commissioner.

Priority policing operations were still being given all necessary resources however, and he stressed they would not be affected by budget cutbacks.

In Limerick he said he had increased the number of gardaí on duty in response to current concerns following the murder of innocent gang victim, Shane Geoghegan, and he had deployed specialist units including the Emergency Response Unit.

He also pointed out that 30 searches had taken place in Limerick, Cork and Dublin that morning as part of the investigation. “We will knock on the doors where that’s necessary,” he said, adding that every effort would be made to find the perpetrators. “It will not be for the want of trying.”

Cuts in the Garda budget mean number of new garda recruits will drop to 400 next year compared to 1,100 annually for the last few years and there will be €80m for overtime compared to €128m last year.

But the commissioner said he did not intend that frontline policing would be affected. “I will have to make hard decisions. I may well have to reduce or defer or slow down some projects that are not core in terms of frontline policing,” he said, but drugs, gangland crime and community policing would all remain priorities.

While the commissioner spoke of balancing the books, however, he and Department of Finance officials came in for questioning about their handling of funds for the purchase of patrol cars in 2006 when such a glut of vehicles were bought that some could not be put on the road for 18 months.

The committee heard from the spending watchdog, the Comptroller and Auditor General, that €17m was made available to the gardaí to buy vehicles in 2006 but the money had to be spend by the end of the year.

The result was that 784 vehicles were bought in a six-week period, the garda garage could not cope with the numbers it had to make ready for the road and some vehicles lay unused until June this year.

Committee chairman, FG TD Bernard Allen, asked if this “use it or lose it” approach to funding was appropriate. Department of Finance principal officer, Paddy Barry, said lessons had been learnt from the episode.