An Garda Síochána also admitted that claims about the number of drink-driving tests carried out in the last five years were grossly exaggerated.
Approximately 14,700 people convicted of driving offences in Ireland will have their convictions overturned after it was revealed that motorists convicted in the courts were prosecuted without a fixed-charge notice first being issued.
According to RTÉ, at a meeting of the Policing Authority on Thursday, the Assistant Commissioner in Charge of Policing apologised to those who were wrongly convicted.
Those convictions will now have to be appealed by Gardaí and court-imposed penalties will have to be removed as part of a process that is set to cost millions of euro, costs which will have to be covered by the State.
It was also revealed at the Policing Authority meeting that the number of drink-driving tests carried out by An Garda Síochana had been exaggerated by a figure close to 1,000,000 (937,000 to be exact), from 2011 to 2016.
Gardaí attributed the massive gap between their figures for the amount of driving tests carried out during that five-year period (1,995,369) to the numbers supplied by the Medical Bureau of Road Safety (1,058,157) to system and policy failures.
Speaking to RTÉ, Assistant Commissioner Michael Finn said: “We were inaccurate, you could say we were sloppy in terms of what we did, but we’ve put our hands up and said, ‘listen, we’ve discovered what we did wrong’ and we’re putting a system in place which appears to be working to address the issue.”
Gardaí say they do not know why the number of drink-driving tests they claimed to have carried out was exaggerated by over 937,000 pic.twitter.com/41aL2Hg1mi
— RTÉ News (@rtenews) March 23, 2017
