Gangs benefit as gardaí hit by pay cuts

Gardaí fear they will lose the war against crime following cuts to overtime budgets.

Senior officers claim investigations into serious crime — including murders and gangland operations — are being seriously affected by the cuts.

National specialist units and divisions with multiple homicide investigations and feuding gangs are the hardest hit, sources said.

The Irish Examiner spoke to detectives and senior officers in the Dublin, Southern, South Eastern, and Eastern regions and to national units. While most were seriously concerned at the cuts, officers in some divisions said they were not affected.

Department of Justice figures show the Garda overtime budget has fallen from €78m in 2010 to a budgeted €39.6m this year.

Garda sources said that further cuts following the Haddington Road deal made the situation worse.

“My real concern is that we don’t want to lose the war against crime,” said one senior officer in a largely rural division but with feuding gangs and a burglary problem.

“We are doing the best we can, but we are down to the bone. Crime investigation is suffering the most.”

He said that, under Haddington Road, gardaí agreed to give an extra 30 free hours in lieu of pay cuts. However, he said, the Department of Justice had cut the overtime budget by an equivalent amount.

In addition, he said, many gardaí will not use those extra hours because of the nature of their duties, meaning that, in effect, the amount of overtime was reduced, on the back of years of cuts.

Another detective, in a different region, said the extra hours were inflexible and that 14 days’ notice had to be given.

“It can be fine for planning policing down the road, but if we have a murder or suspicious death, or get information about drugs or guns, it’s of no use,” he said.

“It used to be the case, if we had a murder it would be all hands on deck, at least for the first week. Now we simply don’t have the numbers or the overtime. No doubt overtime cuts are having a major impact. We are cutting corners.”

A source in a national unit said they had “10 big jobs” on their hit list which could not be carried out due to both a shortage of staff and cuts in overtime. “Overtime has just stopped,” said the source. “It’s the criminals who are benefiting really.”

He said the ability to arrest, process, and interview large numbers of prisoners was very difficult because of the cutbacks.

A senior garda in a busy Dublin division said the cuts were “impinging on criminal investigations big time. We will have to reduce the services to people, that’s it”.

He said big search operations against local criminal gangs were gone. “Previously, you would do one to two big operations a year on the feuding gangs,” he said.

“These ops show them we are in charge, put them on the back foot. You can’t do that any more and they know it. There’s no money and it’s going to get worse.”