AGSI says Gardaí are shocked at conviction of garda for scrambler pursuit

The Association of Garda Sargents and Inspector says its members are shocked at the conviction

of a Garda for dangerous driving after he pursued two masked men on scramblers.

The Garda was convicted of dangerous driving in the Dublin District Court yesterday, banned

from driving for two years, and fined 500 euro following an investigation by Fiss Rue

the Garda Ombudsman.

Members of the AGSI have been gathering at their annual conference in County Mayo, a

crime car respondent Paul Reynolds is there.

Paul, I know this isn't the first time that the issue of how to pursue criminals has

a reason, but tell us about this one and about what the AGSI are saying.

Yeah, it certainly brought us into sharp focus here today, Rachel.

Garda Sean Shields was on duty in a Garda patrol car in July 2024.

Two masked men were driving dangerously on scramblers, they gave him the finger, he pursued

them, they got away.

He was then investigated by Fiss Rue and charged, evidence was given in court, CCTV was produced,

and he was found guilty by the judge in the Dublin District Court of dangerous driving.

He was fined 500 euro and banned from driving for two years.

Now the news, which is on the front page of the Irish independent from Andrew Fielin

today, was greeted with dismay and disbelief here by Sargents and inspectors at the conference.

Scramblers are due to be made illegal on the roads, after 16-year-old Grace Lynch was

knocked down and killed in Fingless earlier this year.

However, the AGSI said today that the protections are not there for Garda doing their job,

trying to protect people from the scourge of scramblers.

delegates here say this case and others like it will have a chilling effect, because

Garda patrol car drivers will now be thinking, I don't really think I want to do this.

Deputy General Secretary of the AGSI, Kevin Bulger also said that it would embolden

those driving the scramblers and e-bikes, they now think they can quote, go for it, because

they know the chances of a car they're pursuing them is lessened.

People are shocked, and you get this with any facet of an investigation where it impacts

a person who's doing their job, and that's basically what these people are, and again,

it more so will affect our sister association in the GRA, because the most of them are

the drivers that are driving this vehicle, and we supervise them.

The reality of it is, it is going to create a problem.

Conversations are happening inside and now we're at conference room there, this morning

people are going, this is kind of ridiculous now.

All the AGSI is also calling today for local fraud and money laundering units to be set

up.

How would that differ from what's in place at the moment?

Well at the moment, there's only the Garda National Economic Crime Bureau, which investigates

frauds all over the country, and we know that the one area of crime that is consistently

increasing is fraud, while others like Bergeri and Tefs are declining much of crime, much

of theft, much of personal crime is moving online.

Now Inspector Brian Downey said today that they had established a local fraud unit in

Balbrigen in North Dublin, and that the fraud convictions there had increased from just

three to over 200, and that millions stolen in scams and laundered as the proceeds of crime,

also through drug dealing, had been identified.

In my area, we set up an economic crime unit to try and address that, and give an example

of what happened in relation to that.

So, the legislation allows for money laundering offenses to actually go after the people who

are laundering that money and allowing their accounts to be used to actually laundering

that money.

So, three years ago when we set up the unit, we looked back and said how many money laundering

cases in my area that we have, we had three.

After setting up the unit, we tripped 200 plus prosecutions, and we looked at the money

that was going through, and we were able to identify five million euros going through

one district in relation to money laundering.

And that was Guard the Inspector Brian Downing.

He was speaking to our crime correspondent Paul Reynolds in Westport.