An Garda's toughest case

The night before the Garda Commissioner's grilling by a committee of TDs and senators, chief superintendents left headquarters in the Phoenix Park and dispersed around the country under orders to get stuck in to what is probably the biggest investigation into suspected data fraud in the history of the State.

Some 1,995,369 alcohol breath tests were recorded on the Garda's Pulse computer system between November 2011 and October last year, and 933,988 of them were fake; invented figures logged on the system by hundreds, if not thousands, of gardai - directly or by phone to the garda information services system - for reasons that the Commissioner Noirin O'Sullivan has yet to explain.

O'Sullivan has launched an internal investigation and promised to punish the fakers, saying that "people responsible at all levels will be held to account".

Right now, the rookie gardai and the rank and file have the spotlight to themselves, because it is their job to input checkpoint returns on the Pulse system.

Alongside the 1,995,369 breath tests recorded are the names of the gardai who inputted the data, along with the date and location of the checkpoint. Technically, at least, they must all now be considered what gardai term "persons of interest" in the internal investigation.

But sorting gardai who faked tests from those who did not will be difficult, if not impossible.

Garda managers returned to their stations with instructions to scrutinise for clues the breath test data for their districts entered on the Pulse system.

Pulse entries can be traced back to a garda and a garda station but not to the alcohol-testing device that counts the tests. There is no reliable paper trail. A briefing document issued by the Garda press office said paper records were "not retained".

There are 12,000 Drager alcohol testing devices in circulation in garda stations across the country. There is no way of telling who used them and when, because they are shared between multiple users.

Even if each of the garda were to be interviewed - an enormous and unlikely task - one garda source wondered how their statements would be corroborated. "If a garda says he or she did 10 tests at a particular time and date, how do you establish that they did not?" he said.

The hunt has begun. Even as O'Sullivan conceded to the Oireachtas committee that gardai may have "deliberately input into the system figures that were not correct", Garda managers in every station in the country were scrolling through Pulse for clues.

They are examining the data for patterns, particularly spikes of unusually high breath test returns, and the authors responsible for those inputs.

Their findings will be fed back to an internal investigation headed by an assistant commissioner, Michael O'Sullivan.

Several officers said privately that they were as blindsided as the public by the fake breath test scandal.

The fake breath test scandal is one of three debacles to hit An Garda Siochana in the past fortnight, the force of which came close to sweeping Noirin O'Sullivan off her perch.

Her tenure has been marked by a slew of reports, internal and external. She will be a key witness in the Charleton Tribunal into allegations of a campaign by Garda management to smear Maurice McCabe.

The next wave hit on March 23, when the Garda held a press briefing to announce a double whammy of blunders from the Garda National Traffic Bureau.

The news of fake breath tests was slipped out along with the more pressing matter on that day - the even more damaging news that 14,700 people who were prosecuted for road traffic offences are to have their convictions quashed after garda error.

Some 14,700 people were prosecuted without a fixed-charge notice first being issued. The Garda now faces potentially massive lawsuits and must bear the costs of appeals against all of the convictions.

The third scandal came with the publication last Wednesday of an audit of spending at the Garda College in Templemore, Co Tipperary, that exposed woeful financial management of its 50 bank accounts for which no one was held to account. Irregularities included a "laundry account" that was used to pay for meals and to fund golf societies.

At an Oireachtas Justice Committee meeting last Thursday, the Garda Commissioner seemed to present the trio of scandals as unexpected ugly specimens lurking beneath "stones" she has upturned in her campaign to reform the force.

She batted away Templemore as a "legacy issue", although she will have to account for it next month before the Public Accounts Committee.

The wrongful convictions of 14,700 motorists - who suffered immediate and serious personal consequences - has been boxed away as a systems error that has now been corrected.

Faking data on Pulse is not so easy to shake off. Primarily because the scandal has bubbled and stewed on her watch.

The Garda National Traffic Bureau had been poking around the breath test statistics since 2014 but it took almost three years since the first flag was first raised for gardai to establish that there was something seriously wrong with them.

In April 2014, a Garda reservist wrote an anonymous letter to Gay Byrne, who was then the chairman of the Road Safety Authority, about issues with checkpoints in the west of the country.

He gave it to the then Transport Minister Leo Varadkar, who gave it to gardai.

O'Sullivan said they were "hindered" from investigating specific allegations but they did investigate the "generalities" and found no issues.

In the summer of that year, Professor Denis Cusack, director of the Medical Bureau of Road Safety (MBRS), raised another query. The bureau supplies and calibrates the Drager breath-testing devices for An Garda Siochana, and also supplies the disposable mouthpieces used for every test.

According to Prof Cusack, in the summer of 2014 the bureau noticed that the Garda stock room hadn't placed an order for mouthpieces in "quite a while". The figures on the Garda website - 400,000 breath tests over two years - suggested that the force should be running out of them.

Prof Cusack said he wrote to Garda about this "didn't know what we were dealing with at the time". Michael Finn, the assistant commissioner now in charge of the traffic bureau, said the MBRS letter "did not go beyond" asking if they wanted more stock.

The guts of a year passed before anything else happened. In March 2015, gardai instructed closer monitoring of mandatory alcohol testing checkpoints and, in June, commissioned an audit of figures in the South East.

Over at the MRBS, Prof Cusack and his team were sufficiently concerned to do their own audit of the Drager alcohol test devices, which count and record the number of tests conducted on each device. Gardai claimed 400,000 breath tests had been carried out but the MRBS discovered the figure was nearer 200,000.

The MRBS informed gardai. A few months after that, in November 2015, gardai got the results of their own regional audit, which showed that the figures on Pulse were out by 17pc.

Another long gap of seven months passed until gardai ordered a national audit of all Pulse figures.

But it is perplexing to understand why it took until February of this year for the assistant commissioner in charge of traffic to discover that he could definitively prove the accuracy of the Garda's breath test statistics by comparing the figures with what was recorded on the Drager device.

Finn said he took the data home at weekends. "We were all examining it to see if we were missing something. On Monday, March 20, when I came back after the weekend, I was satisfied in my heart that we had problems."

Jim O'Callaghan, the Fianna Fail justice spokesman, repeatedly questioned the gaps in the timeline, claiming this sudden "flurry of activity" in February followed an article highlighting the issue in the Irish Times.

O'Sullivan struggled to explain it. She pleaded that she came into the top job with a skeleton staff, depleted resources and ran the place "almost single-handedly". She was contrite.

She shared her fears. "My fear - my real fear - is that this falsification and these mistakes may not be confined to traffic data," she said, before later having to assure alarmed TDs that she is aware of nothing specific.

The question that has most vexed and mystified the Oireachtas committee and the public is why it happened.

At one point last Thursday, O'Sullivan suggested that it could simply be gardai failing to remember the number of breath tests they had done two days after a checkpoint, and instead coming up with a figure.

Pushed to hypothesise by the Fianna Fail TD Jack Chambers on the "cultural trigger" behind it, O'Sullivan suggested that gardai may regard clocking up breath test numbers at a roadside checkpoint as less important than detecting crime.

"A hypothesis may well be that the preventive nature of checkpoints was not valued or viewed as being as important as detections," she said.

It was part of a "cultural" mindset in the force that detecting crime was regarded as more important than preventing crime.

A hypothesis, perhaps, but it appeared to chime with the feedback coming back to officers in recent days.

Mandatory alcohol test checkpoints have been part of the daily lot of gardai since they were introduced in 2009.

Some are scheduled and organised by the traffic corp. Others are performed by gardai as part of the duties on their shift.

One officer outlined the typical scenario for a garda coming on duty for the weekend. There are crimes to follow up, statements to be taken, patrols to be made, on top of the usual menu of incidents thrown up on a Friday night in any busy provincial town.

"On top of all their normal work, they are given a list of checkpoints to achieve in that 10-hour shift," said one source. "They are under pressure to achieve these figures. If they can't achieve it, they say, 'Let's give them the figures anyway'.

"What's in it for the gardai who do this? They either want to make themselves look good or feel they should be out there detecting crime."

Management has questions to answer by heaping pressure on gardai in an already depleted force. If deliberate faking of breath tests was as prevalent as appears, according to one source, it beggars belief that no one in Garda management got wind of it.

What was more likely was that it suited everyone to turn a blind eye. The big concern is that if rank-and-file gardai face sanctions, so should those up the chain whose job it was to supervise, and who may have pressured the lower ranks to make sure they got the figures.

Given the scale of the inflated figures across every district and every region, and the "cultural" problems that may have spawned it, it's not clear how feasible an internal investigation will be, and its effect on garda morale. It is probably one investigation that Garda management would prefer not to solve.

But it has provided useful cover for the Commissioner, who has promised to hold those responsible accountable.

She has bought herself time, promising to produce a report in three months.

She turned in a polished performance. But several committee members, from Sinn Fein's Caoimhghin O Caolain to Fine Gael's Colm Brophy, questioned whether she really got the gravity of what happened.

Fake data undermines the integrity of Ireland's road test data, which helps shape policy both here and in Europe, where An Garda Siochana's figures are shared with pan-European road safety organisations.

More than that, it undermines trust.

As Senator Martin Conway said: "If somebody is prepared to falsify information at a lower level, then they are capable of falsifying information at a more senior level and for more serious offences."