Garda HQ needs to rethink business-like approach to crime

Noirin O'Sullivan

Paul Williams

The decision by the Central Statistics Office (CSO) to resume the publication of the Garda crime figures leaves one major question - can the figures be trusted to give us a true and honest picture of the scale of law-breaking in our society and the Garda efforts to detect it?

And the short answer, based on what we heard yesterday, and from past experience, is an emphatic no. The CSO took the unprecedented step of suspending publication of the crime data last year following a damning Garda Inspectorate report into the way the force was compiling data.