Galway Garda stations facing closure by a thousand cuts

Connemara’s network of Garda stations is being ‘closed by stealth’, and is only manned sporadically.

Galway West TD, Éamon Ó Cuív sensationally claimed this week that only three of the 15 Garda stations in the two Garda districts that serve Connemara, Clifden and Salthill, are open every day as advertised.

The remaining twelve Garda stations are effectively ‘ghost stations’ that are manned on a “very, very intermittent basis at best”, he said.

Deputy Ó Cuív claimed that rural Garda stations in Connemara that are officially ‘open’, are in fact effectively closed because the Gardaí assigned to the stations are sucked into work in big population centres of Clifden and Salthill.

It means that large swathes of Connemara are without a day-time policing presence; and that rural stations are not open during the advertised times that they are supposed to be open. The former Fianna Fáil deputy leader accused Justice Minister Frances Fitzgerald of supplying “inaccurate and false” information to him in a parliamentary question in the Dáil this week.

In a response, she put it on the record that Maam, Carna, Roundstone, Recess, An Cheathrú Rua, Kilronan, Indreabhán, Moycullen, Leitir Mór, Ros Muc, and Oughterard were open from 10am to 1pm Monday to Friday.

Minister Fitzgerald also said Salthill and Clifden Garda stations were open 24 hours, and Oughterard was also open on Saturday from 3pm to 6pm.

Deputy Ó Cuív said it is a “fact” that Minister Fitzgerald has mislead the Dáil and he has called on her to correct the record of the house.

“I know for a fact that the vast majority of the Garda stations in Connemara are not open at all, as the Minister has suggested and are only open on a very, very intermittent basis at best,” he said.

Deputy Ó Cuív said Salthill, Clifden and the station on the largest of the Aran Islands were the only ones that were manned as per the Ministers response in the Dáil.

He said there is a ‘sneaky’ policy of closing Garda stations “by stealth”.

See full story in this week’s Connacht Tribune.