Nearly €250,000 was spent by An Garda Síochána on accommodation that was not actually used by garda personnel during its policing of the Europa League final last year.
A report on the costs of policing the game, held in Dublin in May 2024, was published by the Office of the Comptroller and Auditor General, the State spending watchdog.
The overall policing costs for a three-day period around the game came to €7.8m, with more than €586,000 spent on accommodation for gardaí policing the event.
The total figure also included nearly €5m in overtime payments and more than €300,000 in travel and subsistence costs.
Just over 40pc of the accommodation spend, amounting to €248,500, was related to accommodation that was not used by garda personnel.
A total of €586,042 was spent on 786 rooms, with just over €91,000 spent on 118 rooms that were cancelled but paid for.
A further 128 rooms were cancelled at no cost.
In a report published on the cost of the policing the event, the State spending watchdog said: “Notwithstanding the challenges in assessing demand for necessary accommodation, this level of wastage does not represent value for money.”
Labour Party justice spokesperson Alan Kelly said the figures published in the report are “absolutely extraordinary” and “don’t bring any form of value for money to the taxpayer”.
“You would have to question the scale of those figures and those costs,” he said.
“It also brings into question the value of such events if the costs are going to be so high to the taxpayer.”
Mr Kelly said “serious questions have to be asked” about a sum of nearly €250,000 being spent on accommodation not used by garda members.
“Why was it booked? Who did the capacity analysis? Why wasn’t there conditionality put on it, and why was there such an overanalysis of the requirements of the rooms for this event?
“And the other question to ask is, is this a regular occurrence? Does this happen on other occasions as well?”
It was noted in the report that at the time of the Europa League final, An Garda Síochána did not have a policy in place for planning logistics around “extraordinary events”.
Such a policy was introduced in November 2024.
The report also outlined that hotel rooms were booked in bulk two months before the policing operation, “before instructions were issued to garda members to assess likely demand”.
It said that this, in conjunction with “non-timely submission of requests for accommodation”, resulted in an excess number of hotel rooms being booked.
The report recommended that An Garda Síochána “should investigate the use of a more sophisticated method for the allocation of accommodation, to reduce the risk of administrative errors”.
The garda response agreed to this recommendation, adding that options for providing “support in this area” are being reviewed.
It also recommended that updated travel and subsistence procedures should be brought in “to ensure officials confirm services were not provided at a central level prior to approval of claims.”
This recommendation was also agreed to and the garda response confirmed the change is already in place.
An Garda Síochána and the Department of Justice were contacted for comment.
Credit to : Irish Independent