Garda Commissioner unaware of senior officer’s Westbury Hotel stay during Biden visit, PAC hears

Garda Commissioner Drew Harris arriving at Leinster House for the Public Accounts Committee. Picture: Sam Boal/Collins Photos

The Garda Commissioner has said he had no knowledge of a chief superintendent being accommodated at the Westbury Hotel during the visit of American President Joe Biden, despite the officer already residing in Dublin.

Under questioning at the Public Accounts Committee on Thursday morning, Commissioner Drew Harris said, “I can’t confirm that. That’s the first I’ve heard of that allegation,” adding that he would make inquiries regarding the issue.

The matter was raised by Labour TD for Cork North-Central, Eoghan Kenny, during a debate on the use of public finances within An Garda Síochána. He said that a number of complaints had been made to Garda line management regarding the hotel stay in question.

Mr Kenny stated that the matter involved a senior officer based at Garda HQ in the Phoenix Park and his wife, during the visit of then-President Biden in April 2023.

Commissioner Harris noted that the overtime accrued by Garda members during the presidential visit had totalled €22m, out of an overall budget for the visit of €32m.

An Garda Síochána’s chief corporate officer, Siobhán Toale, meanwhile told the committee that the greatest obstacle in terms of Garda retention at present is not the limited capacity of the force’s training college in Templemore but rather the difficulty in attracting candidates.

Garda retention and recruitment have been ongoing issues for many years, with natural attrition and resignations leaving the overall membership total stuck at roughly 14,000, despite ambitions to raise it to more than 15,000.

Ms Toale noted that “we haven’t achieved our targets over the last few years, we had hoped for 200 (new members) per intake”.

“Our current constraint is not capacity, it is attracting candidates,” she said, adding that a number of changes had been made to the recruitment process to make it more agreeable and to keep applicants interested in a career in the force.

Despite this, the Commissioner insisted that, contrary to popular perception, morale among gardaí remains “strong.”

Separately, Commissioner Harris discussed the shooting incident at a Carlow shopping centre in early June, which saw 22-year-old Evan Fitzgerald take his own life. 

He stated that the gardaí have yet to establish where the two separate firearms found among Fitzgerald’s possessions had come from.

While the pump-action shotgun the shooter used during the incident was legally owned by a neighbour and had been stolen, the provenance of a second shotgun and a replica firearm discovered afterwards has yet to be established, the Commissioner said.

At the time of the events at the Fairgreen Shopping Centre, Fitzgerald had been on bail awaiting trial on multiple charges after attempting to import several firearms into the country via the dark web — guns that, it subsequently emerged, had been provided by the gardaí via a procedure known as “controlled delivery.” 

Deputy Commissioner Justin Kelly defended that strategy before the PAC, noting that such delivery is an internationally recognised policing tactic.

He differentiated controlled delivery from entrapment, giving the example of allowing a consignment of drugs to enter the country and reach its intended destination in order to apprehend those responsible.

“If someone is importing drugs, they've started that themselves. If we intercept them coming into the country and then deliver the drugs, that’s controlled delivery,” Deputy Commissioner Kelly said.