Garda spending

An Garda Síochána, prompted by coming under freedom of information legislation, has begun publishing details routinely about all payments in excess of €25,000.

And for that the decision  should be rightly welcomed.

By accident or design, the information published on the Garda website is not made available in a consistent format, i.e excel, PDF and other styles not readily convertible.

However, we plough on through the data minefield to ensure such info is more accessible and capable of being analysed.

If you find anything interesting in the info, please let us know.

Here's a piece based on the above data published recently in the Ireland edition of The Times.

More than €38.5 million has been paid to the private company which runs the country’s speed cameras since 2013.

New figures published by An Garda Siochana show that the GoSafe consortium receives monthly payments of about €1.4 million for operating a nationwide fleet of speed check vans.

The expenditure is included in a breakdown of €168.3 million spent by gardai on all goods and services with a value in excess of €20,000 between January 2013 and March this year.

The records show that other big clients of the force are Accenture, the management and technology consultancy, as well as Tetra Ireland Communications, Hyundai and Ford.

A garda spokesman said the figures were being proactively published by the force since it became subject to freedom of information legislation on October 14. Gardai are only required to disclose records relating to human resource management, finance and procurement.

Responsibility for the day-to-day management of expenditure is overseen by the finance directorate based in garda headquarters in the Phoenix Park, which has a budget of €1.35 billion this year.

GoSafe, which is based in Listowel, Co Kerry, is contracted to provide 6,000 hours of monitoring a month, using a fleet of 45 vans in 727 zones identified as accident blackspots. The payments it receives are not linked to the number of detections it makes.

Frances Fitzgerald, the justice minister, has said that the income from speeding fines, “is retained and offset against the cost of the safety camera contract”.

On average, the speed cameras detect about 70,000 offences by motorists each year, raising about €5.6 million in fines.

Accenture has received the second biggest share of garda business. The consultancy’s Irish division has been paid almost €28.7 million for IT support and maintenance since 2013. Overall spending by gardai on IT equipment and services is more than €60 million over the same period.

Tetra Ireland Communications, which provides a secure national communications network to gardai and emergency services, has received just under €23 million.

Ms Fitzgerald recently confirmed that more than €34 million had been spent on new garda vehicles since 2012, including the purchase of 640 cars this year.

The latest records reveal that Hyundai has secured business worth €13.4 million from gardai since 2013, while Ford has won contracts to the value of just under €5.3 million. The figures for the first quarter of this year only list payments for vehicles worth €112,600. They were bought from Brady’s of Castleknock in Dublin — a Mercedes-Benz car dealer.

The size of the garda fleet is now at its highest level since 2011, with 2,653 vehicles in service at the end of June, including 1,962 cars, of which 788 are unmarked. The number of garda motorcycles has halved since 2009, with just 121 in operation last year.

Expenditure on the garda fleet has been falling steadily since 2010, when it was €24.8 million, of which €11.75 million was spent on fuel. Last year, fleet maintenance and running costs decreased to €20.5 million, of which €9.4 million went on fuel.

The only detailed breakdown on fuel expenses relates to 2013, when €482,000 was paid to Topaz — the petrol retail group owned by Denis O’Brien. About €1.3 million is spent on average each year on tyres for garda vehicles.

The figures also show that €942,860 has been spent on garda uniforms since 2013.

The Sunday Times revealed yesterday that gardai had spent more than €150,000 on Tasers over the same period as the weapons become a key part of the force’s arsenal. The stun guns are now a standard issue for members of various armed response units around the country.

Gardai are exempt from having to provide any information under freedom of information legislation relating to operational matters including the emergency response unit, the criminal assets bureau and the special detective unit, as well as the use of covert intelligence and the witness protection programme.

Finally here's a link to the data in spreadsheet format http://tinyurl.com/jg5mzoh