No blowback from breathalyser scandal

Each and every station superintendant has been out on the beat and should be able to recognise bogus figures, writes Michael Clifford.

Travelling home from a relative’s house one night last Christmas, I was stopped at a garda checkpoint.

The courteous officer looked in on me. “Where are you off to,” he asked, as if I was a wayward teenager and he was my dad.

“Home,” I said, wondering if I was old enough to be his dad. At this, he leaned in the window.

“Where’s home?” he asked.

I told him and he waved me on. Leaning in was correct and professional. He was looking for a whiff of booze. If he detected it, I would have been asked to blow into the bag. Once all he whiffed was a decaying banana skin on the floor, he saw no point.

After this week’s news, I wonder did the guard chalk me down as breathalysed. After all, when you’re working in a culture where the priority is to ratchet up statistics, rather than police the streets, why not?

The news that An Garda Siochána falsely recorded around 1m breath tests between 2012 and 2016 is shocking, but not surprising. Of 1,995,369 recorded tests carried out, only 1,058,157 corresponded to the use of the breathalyser equipment.

The falsification is right across every region, division and district and has major implications for road safety. It implies that the level of drink-driving believed to be prevalent is hugely underestimated. That, in turn, feeds into policy on road safety, and ultimately the number of deaths on the road.

Last year, the Road Safety Authority published a study showing that alcohol is a factor in 40% of road deaths. Yet now we are being told the roads were not being policed for drink-driving with any degree of seriousness in recent years.

How did this happen?

It’s pretty straightforward. Guards on checkpoints invented the figures. If, for instance, a pair of guards manned a checkpoint for half an hour and breathalysed five motorists, they recorded that they had done 10. Plain and simple and fraudulent and dangerous.

But where lies the real blame? The culture within the force is to single out a few ordinary guards, the requisite “bad apples”, discipline them, and get things back on track.

That won’t wash this time. The bad apples are right across the force. And more to the point, this is not a matter of rank-and-file members pulling wool over the eyes of superiors. In fact, the attitude of senior officers to suspicious figures is ‘don’t ask and you won’t know’.

When these bogus stats were coming in, any superintendent worth his salary would have questioned them. All of them were once on the beat. All of them know, for instance, that if a return of 10 breath tests at a busy checkpoint over a half-hour is recorded, there would have been major traffic back-ups. Surely that is worth inquiring into?

Instead, the prevailing culture is to say nothing in case you find out something. The main thing is that the statistics look good. Who cares how many motorists were tested as long as the official figures are high enough to satisfy the chief super, and keep the road safety people happy?

Who cares at divisional level if the stats look crazy, as long as they don’t appear low compared to that of the chief super in the neighbouring division, or the chief super most likely to be your competitor when the next assistant commissioner job comes up?

Who cares if the stats are bogus? The name of the game is the next move up the ladder. Don’t pull a thread in case something comes tumbling down. And don’t rock the boat by questioning anything. To do that is to invite the wrath of your colleagues, to be labelled a traitor, or worse, a whistleblower.

The Police Authority knows that the real blame does not lie with the ordinary members who are merely doing what is expected of them.

“This is not just an academic matter,” the authority noted in a statement on foot of the news on Thursday.

“It again raises concerns about management and supervision, echoing findings of the Garda Inspectorate, Judge O’Higgins and others. In the view of the Authority, the scale of the discrepancy is further evidence of deep cultural problems within the Garda service – a culture in which such behaviour was possible.”

The prevailing culture has a few outstanding features. The foul stuff never flows upwards. Blame for anything is to be attributed to rank-and-file members at the frontline. Scandal must be avoided at all costs. Boats must not be rocked. Focus on the next rung of your career.

The Police Authority mentioned O’Higgins, but while the O’Higgins commission did criticise supervision and management, it did so in general terms, while singling out young, often inexperienced members for specific criticisms.

The O’Mahoney internal garda report into the penalty points scandal in 2013 was of a similar vein. There were no rank-and-file members to pin blame on there, so just three out of 114 superintendents or inspectors were collared for what was widespread and systemic abuse. And those three were subjected to mere minor disciplinary sanction.

So it went also in the internal Byrne/McGinn garda report into complaints by Sergeant Maurice McCabe about the investigation of crime in Cavan/Monaghan. Young guards, some in dire need of supervision, were fingered for shabby or unprofessional work. Those who should have been supervising them escaped any mention.

That is about culture. It is about impunity, careerism, an over-riding ethic that nobody in a management or a supervisory role ever has to take responsibility for what is systemically wrong within the force.

None of that would be tolerated if An Garda Siochána was subject to proper accountability by its political masters. Instead, politicians from the main parties have for decades been either afraid or unwilling to tackle deep cultural problems.

On Thursday, Fianna Fáil transport spokesman Robert Troy was interviewed on Newstalk about the latest scandal. Presenter Sarah McInerney repeatedly put it to him that what is at issue is, as the Police Authority had said, a major cultural and ethical issue.

“I think it’s very unfair to say there is a culture across all elements of the gardaí, a force in excess of 10,000, and the people I deal with on a regular basis carry out a good job,” said Mr Troy.

“They are people of high integrity. There are some people in every organisation who don’t hold high levels of integrity and it is important that senior people in the gardaí ensure these people are weeded out of the force.”

Troy is not a government minister instinctively defending a State agency.

He is in the opposition, charged with holding the organs of State to account.

Yet he is singing from the same hymn sheet as Government and senior garda management.

Nothing to see here, folks, but a few bad apples.

So it goes with the cops. The foul stuff never travels upwards. And with the body politic nicely compliant, why would it?