Summary Of The Penalty Point Report

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garda

An anonymous author created two documents containing allegations, pertaining to the last four years of serious corruption, destruction and erasing of records, perverting the course of justice, falsification and deception in the administration of penalty points.

On foot of these documents containing allegations, the Assistant Commissioner John O’Mahoney was appointed by the Commissioner to examine the allegations.

A time period of January 1, 2009 to June 30, 2012 was set and the allegations were whittled down to 189 separate allegations in total. It involved 113 Gardaí.

During this time frame, 37,384 fixed charge notices were terminated by officers exercising discretionary powers, or 10,701 per year.

This figure is 2.57% of a total 1.46 million fixed charge notices over this time.

It found:

“No evidence had been adduced to suggest any act of criminality, corruption, deception or falsification as alleged by the anonymous author.”

Assistant Commissioner John O’Mahoney’s report also found possible breaches of discipline by gardai, named as Superintendent A, Inspector B and Inspector C.

Mr O’Mahoney examined 661 terminations conducted by these three guards.

Files have been forwarded to the Assistant Commissioner, Internal
Affairs, the designated authority under the Disciplinary Regulations, for further
investigation.

Mr O’Mahoney identified 2,198 fixed charge notice terminations within the ambit of the 189 allegations made by the whistleblower.

With this in mind, Mr O’Mahoney sidelined the 661 terminations related to A, B, and C, to prevent any prejudice in the disciplinary process, and focused on the remaining 1,537 terminations for his statistical analysis of the allegations.

Of the 1,537 terminations, Mr O’Mahoney found 1,339 (87%) were found to be within the correct administrative procedures while 198 (13%) were found not to have been strictly within administrative procedures.

38 (2.5%) were terminated automatically by the Fixed Charge Processing System as the offender was a juvenile.

241 (15.7%) were terminated under Data Entry Systems Error, while terminations relating to Garda members amounted to 123 (8%).

7 (0.5%) examined had an identifiable family connection to a member An Garda Síochána.

It concludes:

“Had the anonymous author access to more complete information he/she may have found perfectly reasonable and legitimate rationale for the termination of the greater majority of FCN’s he/she so forcefully alleges are corrupt and perverting of the course of justice.”

“On the basis of material examined and the documentation available and the enquiries conducted by this examination it can be clearly shown that allegations surrounding criminal conduct by any of the senior officers in question cannot be substantiated to any degree.”

The report here

Previously: The Penalty Points Whistleblower

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