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THE ASSOCIATION REPRESENTING rank-and-file gardaí has said the breath test scandal is a management issue and blame should not fall on its members.
Speaking ahead of the Garda Representative Association’s (GRA) annual delegate conference in Salthill, Co Galway, president Ciaran O’Neill said his organisation has not been asked to get involved in the current investigation into how almost a million breath tests that never happened ended up on the Pulse system.
“But this is a management issue – they’re the ones that come up with the statistics, they’re the ones that set up the checkpoints, they’re the ones that are sending people out every day to do the checkpoints,” he told reporters.
He said the role of managers is to “ensure the job is done”.
Their role is to make sure checkpoints are set up and their role is to make sure we are being properly supervised.
In March, garda management revealed that over a five year period, some two million breath tests were recorded on the force’s internal system. A review of these figures found almost a million of these tests never actually happened.
At the same time, they confirmed an error meant 146,856 summonses were wrongly issued to drivers.
An internal investigation into the phantom breath tests is currently ongoing and Garda Commissioner Nóirín O’Sullivan has said at best it was “incompetence, at worst deception”.
O’Neill rejected O’Sullivan’s comments that there was responsibility for this at every level, from bottom to top.
“How could it be a collective responsibility when we don’t know and we’ve no part to say whether we have been involved or haven’t been involved. We haven’t been part of the investigation at that level.”
He said if there was deception or dishonesty, there are discipline regulations to deal with that, though he added these regulations had not yet been invoked.
O’Neill also said he thinks recent scandals will give fuel to people “whose mindset would be against An Garda Síochána”.
“But the majority realise it’s not the guards on the job, not the guard on the frontline – the issues lie with senior management”.
For live updates from the conference in Galway over the next three days, follow @michellehetweet.
In fairness I very rarely have issues with Vodafone broadband.
@John Sheahan: me either. Had a short outage in County Wex earlier. It’s back now.
Vodafone are brilliant. 1 minor issue and the big spoilt boys and girls have a melt down because they can’t watch the toyshow. FFS, if that’s your biggest issue then life ain’t 1/2 bad.
@Santa: totally agree, very rarely are there any issues with their service
@Santa: Minor issue? I was an hour on h old waiting for customer service during which my 2 kids were asking every 5 minutes when will the WiFi be back. I was a Virgin media customer and never had these problems.
@Bramer: what a life and death situation you were in I hope things worked out for you with this serious first world problem
@Bramer: yes its minor and the more people who ring them the longer their response times.
Just don’t bother with the RTE player. Awful app but the adds play perfectly.
@tottkingham: vpn mate. No ads. Works beautifully along with bbc iPlayer all 4 and itv, netflix most radio players to on your phone.
Do yourself a favor. Vpn.
@De Green Parrot: which vpn app do you use?
@tottkingham: or use brave. Best out of the box ad blocking browser.
Absolutely shocking service from Vodafone tonight. But to be honest very poor service from them in general recently. After 20 years I’m Seriously considering whether or not to continue with this crowd of changers
@Johnny Casey: I think one outage or issue in 20 years is fairly good service, no?
@Johnny Casey: are you having a meltdown because you’re going to miss late late toy show
@Mary OGorman McGuire: I spent three weeks without my broadband. They sent an engineer to check the outside line TWICE in a week to check the outside line and the line into the house. Booth times he told them lines were fine, faulty modem. Took my parent modem (as I needed it for work) which worked perfectly, then spent another 6weeks arguing to get a new modem sent. I wouldn’t call that great!! My modem was 5 yrs old. Hardly required about 50 phone calls and paying an engineer for two visits (who looked completely baffled on his second visit)
@Johnny Casey: yeah, frequent outages here recently too, affecting my ability to work.
@Johnny Casey: with them 20 plus years, to be fair these situations don’t happen very often with Vodafone and I live in an area with no broadband only Wi-Fi
@Johnny Casey: get on digiweb. Vodafone is a joke.
@De Green Parrot: Dodgyweb are rubbish, those Fritzbox routers are a joke along with their support, logged a business support call and still waiting for a response. Its far longer now than the 72 hours they claim and they have ignored subsequent update requests.
Its back working so they did their job much thanks.
With them 4 years, this is the first issue I’ve had with them, siht happens though doesn’t it? Some serious First World Problem people on the Vodafone Twitter account today! It’s grand now again anyway.
If you’re able to, change your DNS settings in your router to something like Google’s: 8.8.8.8 for primary and 8.8.1.1 for secondary. If you don’t know how to do this then wait for Vodafone to resolve the issue I guess. This fixed it for me though.
@Limited Edition: I changed to 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4
Works fine…. Though connections slightly slower.
Did anyone actually read the 2nd last sentence? Lol
@Frank Flanagan: wait until you read the 23rd, it’s a doozy
I’m with them over 20 years and outages happen but very rarely!
Now it makes sense! In fairness generally super service from Vodafone!
Well mine keeps dropping every hour during work so it’s not the best but at least it has very few outages.
We were out for a couple of hours, but in fairness this is 1st time having a problem
@яα¢нєℓ: 5 yrs using Vodafone TV & Internet. three outages, one pre-notification email sent for 6 hr outage (was back in 4 ) 3 years ago. One this Tues for 1hr and the longer one today. Generally very good service, have used in 2 households (we carried our service over/ seamless transfer)
Change your DNS server to 8.8.8.8 on your device, that will fix it until Vodafone resolve it. Don’t forget to set back to auto after Vodafone fix it.
They had a deadline and hit it so fair play. Would have been a disaster otherwise. I’m with VM and I was without internet for about 5 days recently and I work from home. No other option where I’m living.
I had vodafone gigabit broadband installed yesterday, only started the contract today so I was thinking crap, I shouldn’t have changed providers. I read through the instructions and, I guess as well as the outage today, the guy that installed the fibre used the wrong cable from the router to the modem. Great first impression.
@Laura Halpenny: I just got rid of vodafone gigabit. Every night between 7-11 The speed dropped to 10mb from 1000. Foght my way out of the contract only with them for 2 months. Anyway. With digiweb now. All good. But never again will I go near vodafone. Weeks of telling them the same story and they keep telling me it’s on my end.
@Laura Halpenny: The gigabit service is SIRO. the modem is installed at wall at entry to the fibre cable and has a separate power cable that plugs in to closest socket. Its a standard LAN cable connecting that to the router. Amazing they messed that up
@De Green Parrot: Are you an ad for digiweb?
@John Murray: hi john…I looked at the instructions after and for the gigabit one you have to install the WAN cable from the LAN port on the router – he should’ve read the instructions- I did lol
I received a call from Vodafone customer service yesterday to send me out a brand new Huawei P40 pro, they just wanted me to call out my IBAN number to them over the phone before they could send it on to me..
They sent me a text while talking to verify its them…what does anyone think of this ?
I don’t have sky so while internet down stuck with rte
Ppl still use Vodafone?
Seriously, why?
Can’t complain about Vodafone never had problem before tonight.
have your say