Irish police grossly exaggerated the number breath tests it carried out on motorists, an internal report has found.

The report found that 3,498,400 tests were recorded on the police computer system dating back to 2009, but only 2,040,179 were carried out.

Across the country as a whole almost 1.5m fake tests were recorded, and in County Tipperary nearly four times more breath tests recorded than actually carried out.

The report suggests some officers may face disciplinary action, but that the internal inquiry team did not discover any behaviour that would merit criminal investigation.

The officer in charge of the report, assistant commissioner Michael O’Sullivan, said there was no evidence that officers gained any tangible benefit from making up breathalyser test numbers, and that inadequate technology was a constant theme of his audit. An environment nevertheless existed where the discrepancies identified were “allowed to happen without intervention”, he said.

The audit noted the cuts to police budgets from 2008-2013 during Ireland’s financial crisis. It pointed out that at the time no senior Garda Traffic Corps positions were filled that officers had to cope with increased workloads while management were asked to do more with less.

“When supervision is absent, poor practices will inevitably develop and continue to deteriorate if left unchecked. Unfortunately this was evident throughout this examination,” O’Sullivan’s report said.

Opposition parties in the Irish parliament have called for the resignation of the police commissioner, Nóirín O’Sullivan, but the minority Fine Gael government said it still had full confidence in her.



She told Irish media on Wednesday: “These failures are completely unacceptable and all of us in An Garda Síochána must now take responsibility for ensuring this cannot happen again.”

She said the falsified checks damaged public confidence in the force, and added: “We are committed to ensuring the required cultural, behavioural and systems changes are made.”

Ireland’s communications minister, Denis Naughten, said: “Those who are responsible for this need to be held accountable. We’re talking about 1.4 million [false tests] … this couldn’t have happened by accident.”



He declined to say what measures the government would take against those found responsible.



A second report published this week looked into revelations that 146,000 people were taken to court and 14,700 people wrongly convicted of motoring offences because of issues with the fixed-charge notices.

The independent leftwing MP Mick Wallace has long raised concerns about alleged police corruption and wrongdoing in Ireland.

On Thursday he said: “The controversy surrounding our police force would be funny if it wasn’t so sad. Successive governments have refused to deal honestly with how we do policing, pretending that it’s really not that bad.

“It has reached a new level of incompetence with the present Garda commissioner, as we’ve witnessed one crisis after another. The new taoiseach, who promised to be more decisive, seems to have already fallen into the regular pattern of ‘see no evil, speak no evil.’”

Irish police have been rocked by a series of scandals in recent decades, including an inquiry into the Donegal force in 2008 which found that officers had planted firearms in order to justify arrests.