Gardai Admit Massive Mistakes in Road Traffic Admin
Thousands of drivers will have their motoring convictions and / or penalties overturned after a serious mistake by the gardaí.
It's after it emerged some people were summonsed to court even after they'd paid a fine for offences like speeding or not having a valid NCT certificate.
Between 2006 and 2016 there 10.5 million Fixed Charge Notices issued for various road traffic offences.
In 147,000 of cases there was a court summons issued as well as a fine.
Of those, 96% had other offences that could have landed them in court (for instance having no tax or insurance.)
However almost 6,000 had no other offence and should have just received a fixed charge notice.
All these cases will be appealed in court. The gardaí won't be contesting them meaning fines, possibly in the millions, will have to be re-paid.
Superintendent Con O'Donoghue has apologised for the mistake.
"It represents a small proportion but even at that we want to correct it, we want to make sure it doesn't happen again. So we have changed our IT system so this can't happen."
This all came to light when in April of last year, a person was brought to court for not having an NCT Cert. It turned out they'd already paid their fine, and the case led to review of garda records.
Separately, the force has also admitted recording nearly 1 million breath tests in the Pulse system that never took place, but gardai don't know what caused the mistake.
Officers were recording the figures from memory instead of digitally; a practise which has now been changed according to chief commissioner Michael Finn:
"We're investing a lot of money in the organisation to make sure the mistakes of the past... the paper based records we had in place which were obviously totally inadequate. We have to move on from that, we have to get new systems."
The mistakes raise questions over garda procedures, and they say an internal investigation has been launched to establish how it occurred.