GRA president says Reserve has 'failed'

The president of the Garda Representative Association (GRA) has described the Garda Reserve as a failed concept and appealed to the Garda Commissioner to end what he termed "a farcical waste of money".

In an address to the GRA annual conference in Tullow today, John Egan criticised the amount of full-time Garda hours being spent overseeing the Reserve force.

"Can we really afford to have a Chief Superintendent, a Superintendent, several Sergeants and even more professional Gardaí overseeing reserves when they could be fighting gangland crime?” he said.

“We ask you to cap the numbers now in the reserve. End this farcical waste of money. Spend it where it could be put to best use, on more real professional gardaí,” he added.

He also appealed to the Commissioner to increase the amount of Garda numbers in rural stations saying "rural Ireland had been denuded of all but tokenism".

“Every village in this country has grown in population, and has policing problems such as drugs, anti-social behaviour, crime.”

“How can the single Garda attached to these stations cope, when they are on their own and spend most of their time in the urban areas supporting the depleted, overstretched force?,” he said.

On the subject of uniformed officers carrying firearms, Mr Egan said he had reservations about the blurring of the line between armed, plain clothes and unarmed, uniform members.

However he allowed there was a need to have more armed gardaí trained and available for deployment.

“More gardaí should be trained in the use of firearms as in the 1980s. We further believe that gardaí who wish to volunteer to carry firearms should be facilitated with intense and continuous training,” he said.

Mr Egan also criticised the Garda Siochana Ombudsman Commission(GSOC) saying its powers had been "interpreted to the extreme with negative effect" and that "internal accountability was causing conflict".

He appealed to the Commissioner to prevent excessive intrusion by the GSOC.