It’s just criminal what the force is getting away with
THE disclosure that gardai somehow missed 234 homicides and classified them as lesser crimes should shock, but it won’t. So should the fact senior civil servants earning as much as government ministers don’t know how to search their emails, especially damning ones relating to Sgt Maurice Mccabe.
And there we were being told Ireland is a low-crime country when all along at the back of our mind we knew it was rampant.
For years you’ve been saying that this is a crime-ridden country where people, especially women, aren’t safe in their homes never mind the street.
How many times have distraught parents rang up Joe Duffy to relay some horror story of how their son was beaten to a pulp on the street in an unprovoked attack.
But we’d be reassured by the Government stats which show violent crime is relatively rare and the official figures don’t lie.
Now we know the truth. To put it bluntly – the crime figures going back as far as 2003 have been a load of bollocks.
Imagine missing 234 homicides. Think of all those bodies, the lines of coffins and no one noticed.
That’s 234 funerals with grieving families and they never existed according to the gardai’s PULSE computer system. Indeed they would still not exist if not for garda civilian analysts Lois West and Laura Galligan, the two brave women who highlighted this madness.
It must be extremely frustrating for the ordinary gardai out there doing their best and getting dogs’ abuse for doing it.
They must be asking themselves how it came to a situation where the force is being accused of everything from money laundering and smearing whistleblowers as child sex offenders to doctoring the crime figures.
I won’t mention the strange case of the vanishing penalty points and the million bogus breath tests... or was it two million? Who’s counting? Certainly not the Garda bosses.
If a newspaper claimed it was selling many more papers than is the case
it would be accused fraud.
Yet when the police force manages to overlook the odd hundred or two killings we’re hearing all sorts of words like “miscalculation” and “misclassification”. of
And who could forget the famous excuse for over a million bogus breath tests... it was all a matter of “elevation”. With that one you half expected Bono to hop out of a squad car and start blowing into a bag.
Apparently the Garda’s notorious PULSE computer system is responsible for mixing up manslaughters with minor crimes.
“It wasn’t me gov, it was PULSE, he’s as guilty as sin”, seems to be what the Garda bosses would have us believe.
Don’t be surprised if you wake up some morning to reports that PULSE has gone berserk and cut out the middleman and started to commit a few manslaughters himself.
It’s not funny but we’re being asked to believe the unbelievable with claims a computer is somehow to blame for making up false statistics.
It wasn’t PULSE who “belittled and treated poorly” civilian analysts West and Galligan because they refused to sign off on homicide figures that were “completely inaccurate”and “misleading”.
It’s not just me who is sceptical as the official body responsible for compiling the figures, the Central Statistics Office doesn’t trust them either.
Indeed until this week it would not accept them and even now with latest figures the CSO have been issued Ms Fitzgerald “under reservation” which is a polite way of saying these could also be made up as well. When you can’t trust the force to tell the truth who can you trust?
Not the body which oversees them – the Department of Justice – which has an even more tempestuous relationship with the truth.
A review set up after the emergence of emails which led to to former justice minister Frances Fitzgerald quitting last November is nothing short of amazing.
The search for them only began when Labour’s Alan Kelly began asking awkward questions in the Dail, otherwise, like the dodgy Garda homicide stats, we’d be none the wiser and Frances would be still in her job.
Apparently the bukos on the huge salaries didn’t search in the right area when they went looking for relevant emails for the Disclosures Tribunal into the alleged smearing of Maurice Mccabe.
While no one is to blame, is there ever, the review found emails “could and should have” been given over to the tribunal much earlier and that there was “no meaningful explanation” as to why they were not.
Mr Kelly said it is “quite extraordinary” and calls into question the quality of information coming from the Justice Department over the last two decades.
He said it is unbelievable that the emails of senior people in the policing division of the Department were not checked.
Just imagine missing 234 homicides, all those bodies