Alarming drop in number of gardaí policing county
Garda numbers in Donegal fall by over 100 amid fears over a hard border
GARDAÍ are reviewing a sharp decline in officer numbers in Donegal, the Irish Mail on Sunday can reveal.
The number of gardaí policing Donegal has fallen by over 100 since peak levels in the boom time, as issues of cross-border crime come to the fore.
It comes as fresh concern was expressed this week that the Irish Army is so damaged by years of cutbacks that it would be incapable of sealing off the border, in the event of a hard Brexit.
Figures from March show the number of gardaí in the border county stood at just 378, down from 488 in 2008.
The shock figures mark a 23% drop in policing levels in the area.
In response to a parliamentary question from Fianna Fáil’s Pat the Cope Gallagher in May, the then justice minister Frances Fitzgerald admitted the number of gardaí in the county had dropped to 378 as of March 31, 2017.
She added that when appropriate the work of local gardaí is supported by elite units such as the National Bureau of Criminal investigation and the Garda National Drugs and Organised Crime Bureau.
Former Garda Commissioner Nóirín O’Sullivan is understood to have sought a report into the decline of Garda numbers in the Donegal Division after the figures were revealed.
Ms O’Sullivan began to evaluate the matter on a county-wide basis after the number of gardaí dropped by more than 100.
Informed sources told the MoS that policing levels in the border county have been ‘decimated’ in recent years.
The figures come a week after student Shanan Reid McDaid was left for dead following a random attack in Letterkenny.
The 18-year-old was hospitalised after she was attacked by a stranger while waiting to get a cab home after a night out in Letterkenny.
She was left with severe facial injuries from being repeatedly punched in the early hours of Sunday morning. The attack happened in the Market Square area at around 3am as Shanan’s friends walked ahead of her. The thug verbally abused her; as she turned round, he attacked her. Shanan this week said she feared she would die during the beating. The unknown attacker ran off, leaving her battered and with cuts to her head.
Gerry McMonagle, chairman of the Donegal Joint Policing Committee, said that in addition to the cut in officer numbers, the county had also sustained the ‘closure’ of the Glenties Garda district following the amalgamation of Garda operational districts in 2012.
The Sinn Féin county councillor said the officer numbers illustrated the extent of cuts presided over by successive Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil governments.
In May, then-justice minister Frances Fitzgerald told the Dáil that the Garda Síochána Inspectorate, at the request of the Policing Authority, was carrying out a review of the use of resources. She said the review would include a consultative process with local communities and would be completed ‘within the first half of 2018’.
Meanwhile this week Senator Gerard Craughwell warned about the preparedness of the Irish Army in the face of Brexit.
He claimed that cutbacks suffered by the Army resulted in the defence forces coming under pressure during last Monday’s storms.
‘Such is the extent of these cutbacks across engineering and other divisions that during Hurricane Ophelia the Army had only been in a position to supply five chainsaw operatives across the country,’ Mr Craughwell said in the Seanad.
Mr Craughwell, who has announced his plan to run for President, said during Storm Ophelia there had been just ‘two qualified chain saw operators covering the entire northern section of the country’. He also claimed that the lack of resources illustrated by Storm Ophelia had ‘serious implications for our capacity to police a hard Brexit border’.
The senator’s warning comes amid growing concerns in Government circles that poor UK negotiating tactics mean Ireland will experience a hard Brexit.
Mr Craughwell, himself a former Army officer, warned that ‘command structures are crumbling and the Irish Army now only has a skeleton officer staff’.
The current situation, he warned, ‘is already having an impact on our
‘Command structures are crumbling’
capacity to implement our UN mandate. How, then, are we to police a border from Donegal through Cavan, Monaghan and Louth when we have as little as one officer per three platoons?’
The Irish Army had, he said, ‘lost the corporate memory needed to patrol a hard border’.
A Department of Defence spokesman said the ‘variety of roles’ undertaken by the Defence Forces had demonstrated their capacity. Responding to claims of under-funding the spokesman added: ‘The Defence allocation was increased by €25m in Budget 2018 bringing the total allocation to €946m; a €16m increase was secured in Budget 2017.’
In response to concerns over Brexit; defence minister Paul Kehoe said a UK exit from the EU does not ‘of itself’ give rise to additional border security requirements ‘at this time’.
‘My Department and the Defence Forces are fully prepared to address any potential issues arising in the defence area on foot of Brexit,’ he said.