Ridicule followed GRA decision to reject advice

The farce that saw the Garda Representative Association widely ridiculed for rejecting any blame over the breath-test fiasco could have been avoided if their leaders had listened to their own media advice, it has emerged.

The day after the breathalyser controversy broke, September 15, GRA General Secretary Pat ennis wrote to the 31 members of its Central executive Committee to remind them that their media team had advised them ‘not to issue any statement’.

however, he went on to say that the executive had ‘overruled this advice’, and had decided to issue a statement ‘refuting our members’ culpability for the falsification of breath test data’.

After this, their press spokesman John O’Keeffe gave an interview to RTÉ radio, in which he insisted that GRA members had not falsified breath-test reports, while also admitting that they had ‘elevated’ them.

This led to ridicule and went viral on social media.

The GRA’s communications team, which includes Mr O’Keeffe, had cautioned the GRA executive that a strong denial would only ‘make our members the central focus of the breath test scandal’.

Meanwhile, a frustrated garda has taken to an internal GRA Facebook page to express his ‘amazement’ at how Garda management and the Government are preoccupied with ‘irrelevant figures’ instead of ‘looking at numbers that could make the entire criminal justice system actually work’