Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 9 May 2019

Public Accounts Committee

2017 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Vote 20 - An Garda Síochána
Chapter 7 - Management of Overtime Expenditure in An Garda Síochána

9:00 am

Mr. Drew Harris:

It falls squarely on my shoulders, as Accounting Officer, to determine how we manage the overtime. We are a growing organisation. The budget is growing, as is the size of the organisation. In overall numbers, our previous high point was in 2009. When one adds Garda staff to the number of members of the force, we are now in excess of that high point. We are as large as we have ever been and more expansion is planned. It is for me to direct the priorities in terms of how we spend our money. A lot of the overtime budget seems to get caught up in practices over which we have no discretion and that takes money away from the operational drive that I want from the overtime. The 15-minute briefing time payment drains money from the overtime budget and effectively leaves us with between €72 million and €73 million for overtime. That is considerably less flexibility than we had in 2017 in respect of budgets.

A lot of the documentation compares us with other jurisdictions but with respect, in other jurisdictions the police services no longer take on some of the duties which still fall very squarely on An Garda Síochána and take up our overtime budget. I refer to things like gardaí escorting prisoners to and from courts, a practice which has been largely eradicated in other jurisdictions. We are facing enormous pressures in terms of serious criminality and are having to supplement our policing effort to prevent serious crime. At the moment, we obviously have a very difficult issue in terms of ongoing, vicious drug feuds. In that context, it is up to me and members of my senior team to review how we are spending our money and determine whether it could be better spent. We need to decide if things could be done differently or in a way which would not actually cost as much or consume as much overtime. That is not just about things that we think we could divest ourselves of responsibility for but also the manner in which we take on other operations and adopting a different profile in respect of those. There is a hierarchy of priorities in terms of how we spend our money. We have to focus on serious criminality, particularly where lives are in danger and there is serious risk of harm.

The deputy Garda commissioner is engaged in a project at the moment involving a deep analysis of where our overtime budget is going. In some divisions-----