Reserve Garda force deserve our support

THE move to widen and strengthen the powers and duties of over 1,124 volunteers in the Garda Reserve is a positive and welcome development for policing at a time when the image of the Garda Síochána in general is tarnished.

This should be a valuable aid to members of the full-time force, which is undermanned and overstretched, by relieving them to concentrate more on the business of tackling serious crime while volunteers deal with time-consuming lesser offences.

Effectively, the decision taken by Garda Commissioner Nóirín O’Sullivan, who has the full backing of Justice Minister Frances Fitzgerald for this radical initiative, will greatly extend the powers of the reserves by enabling them to issue penalty points, serve summons to motorists and seize vehicles. When going on duty they will also be issued with TETRA radios, a key component of the national digital radio service used by the gardaí, giving them security against unlawful eavesdropping by criminal elements.

With another 48 reserves in training, it makes sense to recruit more as the Garda Reserve has become a convenient stepping stone for a surprising number of applicants hoping to join the front-line force. Ms Fitzgerald told the Dáil that 23 members of the first group who entered the college in Templemore as trainee gardaí had been members of the Garda Reserve. A further 17 former members of the Garda Reserve were in the second batch of 100 recruits, while 13 former members were in the third batch of 100 recruits.

Up to now the duties carried out by the Garda Reserve have been somewhat limited, confined largely to the kind of work normally done in Garda stations which includes monitoring CCTV street cameras. In the course of more active duties such as foot patrols or manning cordons at major festivals and sporting events, the reserves are always accompanied and supervised by regular Garda members.

With the aim of broadening their supportive role alongside members of the regular gardaí, they will also be trained at the Garda college in Templemore in modern methods of dealing with sensitive issues such as domestic violence, child protection, bullying, harassment and conflict resolution. The training programme also include techniques of ‘out of vehicle safety training’.

These initiatives follow an internal review of how the reserve body has performed since it was set up in 2006. According to the minister the new powers will help them to “make a greater contribution to policing.”

Among the reserves who joined up in earlier campaigns were foreigners had who made Ireland their home. With the country becoming increasingly multicultural, their involvement in policing is an invaluable asset, especially for interacting and engaging with mixed race communities to provide them with crime-prevention advice.

A Garda force left bruised and battered by the whistleblower crisis, and which lost a mine of intelligence information to retirement, needs all the help it can get. In the never-ending fight against crime, the Garda Reserve is an important arm of the law and deserves the public’s support.