‘The guy was coked out of his mind’ - on patrol with a Garda roads policing unit

The old farmer puts up no resistance when pulled over on this pitch black December night.

“There’s a very strong smell of drink,” says Garda Linzi Martin after speaking to him.

Moments earlier Garda Chris Lynch had swung their unmarked Garda car out of Delvin Garda station in Co Westmeath to start their shift, with his partner Martin sitting alongside.

The two gardaí, with The Irish Times joining them for a “ride along”, come across the farmer in his van by chance. The speed of the van is a giveaway; he’s driving too slow. When the driver pulls off on to a slip road without indicating, Lynch and Martin decide to pull him over. Flicking on their blue lights, they are convinced this man is their first drunk driver of the night.

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They’re correct. There is a waft of alcohol from him when he talks. It turns out the driver had been working, gone to the pub for several pints and then decided to drive home. Suspected of being intoxicated, he is brought from the roadside near Delvin village, where he was stopped, to Mullingar Garda station, about 20km away, where he will have a blood sample taken by a doctor.

The driver tells Lynch and Martin he is in his 70s and reveals he has been caught drink driving before. It means he could be banned for four years this time, not the usual two.

“That’ll probably be the end of me driving,” he tells the gardaí, mulling his age and the likely ban ahead.

Standing on the roadside, he seems unsteady on his feet. He looks and sounds remorseful. But it’s too late. To compound his situation, passing drivers are nosily rubbernecking, straining to see who has just been stopped by the guards.

“We’re lighting up some WhatsApp group right now,” says Martin of the rural grapevine.

This is the rhythm of the job for Martin and Lynch: catching intoxicated drivers as they patrol, performing checkpoints or responding to the scene of crashes. A year ago both became the two-strong Delvin Roads Policing Unit. In the past 12 months they have caught almost 150 drunk drivers.

Both Martin and Lynch are in their 30s, live in the area and love their work.

“When you join the guards you take an oath and you swear on the Bible, but I swore on the Road Traffic Act,” says Lynch, laughing.

Policing the roads is not just his dream career; it’s personal.

He grew up in Trim, Co Meath and one night in 2005, when he was a teenager, his 19-year-old best friend drove home from the pub and was killed in a crash. Six others died on Irish roads that weekend.

“He just made a poor decision,” says Lynch.

“Ever since that ... I just thought: ‘This is crazy, he did that and now he’s dead’. Every time we stop someone, every drink driver we stop I think of what might have happened to that person. They might have killed someone, killed themselves.”

In 2005, some 572 people were killed on the roads. Road deaths remained persistently above 400 from the mid-1980s to 2001, when they began to decline, and dropped below 200. This year there have been more than 180 deaths on the roads. 2023 is set to be the worst on the roads for at least a decade.

[ Lower speed limits and mandatory drug testing among new measures aimed at reducing road deaths ]

The number of gardaí assigned to roads policing is 659 nationally, down from 692 at the end of last year and the lowest level since 2017. The Irish Times recently revealed gardaí had so far this year carried out half the drinking driving checks as 2019.

The two Delvin traffic gardaí use the word “lawless” when describing the worst things they have seen. Many of those incidents have involved cocaine. The drug is becoming increasingly preferred to alcohol by young men because it doesn’t lead to weight gain and is perceived by many as hangover-free.

Lynch recalls one recent crash where a driver “coked out of his mind” crashed his high-powered car into a roundabout. driver passed a breathalyser, even though he was “slurring his speech”. Lynch then produced the new roadside drug test kit – similar to Covid-19 antigen test – and the driver was positive for both cocaine and cannabis.

In another incident, members of the public rang gardaí about a drunk driver, with Lynch and Martin eventually getting eyes on him, only for the driver to hit the back of a car parked outside a house.

“We pulled up alongside and he put the window down and it was like Snoop Dogg was in the car, just smoke coming out from everywhere,” Lynch says of contents of the airbags filling the vehicle.

“We took him out of the car and he was rubbered, for lack of a better phrase; very, very drunk.”

The next day, when Lynch returned the man’s car keys, which the driver mistakenly left at the station, the man couldn’t remember any of the previous night’s events. When the driver’s blood test results were returned, they showed he was almost six times over the legal limit for alcohol.

[ One person per hour arrested for intoxicated driving since new road safety campaign launched ]

Other things also worry Martin. She is concerned at the condition of many modified cars they have seized from young men, so-called “boy racers”.

When one car they recently seized was put up on a hoist, the suspension springs fell out; the handbrake was found to have been held on with a cable tie underneath the car.

Driving the roads of Westmeath for a few hours with Martin and Lynch is an education. Their car – a Hyundai Tuscon NVX hybrid – is one of a (slowly) growing number of Garda vehicles fitted with automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) technology. It automatically reads the registration of every vehicle they pass on the road. It flags any passing vehicle that has been reported stolen, is untaxed, has no NCT or is of interest for any other reason.

Many vehicles Martin and Lynch pass on this December night are untaxed. At times three in succession are flagged for that reason but they cannot go after them all.

“If a car is flagged for two things, maybe tax and NCT, we will go after them because in those cases, usually there’s also no insurance,” says Martin.

[ Uninsured drivers involved in 40 incidents each week ]

Using an app on their Garda-issue phones, they can also check any intelligence about a vehicle – and its owner.

Martin and Lynch have stopped some drivers who sped away, leading to pursuits. On one occasion, they had to use their car to pin a vehicle against a ditch when the driver refused to stop. On another, a driver consuming “fast gas” (a type of nitrous oxide) from a balloon en route to a concert sped away from Lynch and Martin. He drove on to the festival site where Martin and Lynch penned him in. Even then, he tried to escape, taking the Garda car door clean off.

Martin says she and her colleagues would like better driver training, up to the advanced level available to their colleagues in armed units. They also need high-powered cars – and more of them – to match the drivers she and Lynch meet on the roads. They also make an appeal – a plea, even – for a much clearer policy around vehicle pursuits. They fear being disciplined or investigated if, during a pursuit, they drive in a manner later deemed to have involved disproportionate risk.

These concerns are upper most in their minds. It is clear that, in the absence of better training and clearer policies, they feel senior management is not fully supporting them.

“We would like to be trained like the UK police on how to actually deal with these situations, without worry that we are jeopardising our jobs,” Martin says.

[ Issue of criminals speeding wrong way down Irish roads must be addressed, GRA says ]

“We don’t want to be left thinking: ‘They crashed into us and now we know we’re going to be investigated’. What do we do? Do we just allow these people to continue burgling people’s houses and then driving the wrong way down motorways? What are we to do? And we’d like support from our own on that.”