Limerick Garda station ‘full of rats’ before it closed

THE old Newcastle West garda station was a “health and safety hazard”, where “rats were looking down through roof tiles” Superintendent Aileen Magner declared, when she defended the decision to close it and move gardai to other locations until a new one could be built.

Her comments came at a meeting of the Newcastle West Joint Policing Committee where it emerged that building the new station will not start until early 2023 and will take 12 to 18 months to complete.

She was responding to Municipal District chairman, Cllr Liam Galvin who wanted to know why the station couldn’t have been kept open until the diggers were ready to move in. “We had a party here for the closing down of the garda station,” he said. “Now we are told it will be years before the new one is built.”

“I will make no apology for the closing of the station,” the superintendent said. It was not safe for staff, for prisoners, for people coming in. “Any garda station where you have rats looking down through roof tiles is not a safe environment for a Chief Superintendent or Superintendent to ask people to work in,” she said.

Chief Superintendent Gerard Roche, who also attended the meeting, agreed. “We probably kept that station open longer than we should have,” he said. He described the prison cells as inhuman and worse than in India and the Garda Commissioner, who had visited the station, had said they were the worst he had seen, North or South, the chief superintendent told the meeting.

But now, he said, the new station was included in the recently announced capital expenditure programme and in the OPW plans.

“The plans are about to be sent back to us to be signed off and will then go to tender. Early in 2023, we will start building and it will take 12 to 18 months to finish.”

Superintendent Magner also responded to councillors’ concerns that phone calls after 9pm at night were not being answered in Newcastle West but instead were diverted to Henry St.

All calls from 7am to 9pm each day are handled locally in Newcastle West, she said. Any calls after 9pm, were diverted to a dedicated control room in Henry St, where there was a dedicated staff taking calls and dispatching the nearest cars. “It is actually a very effective system,” she said.

Emergency or 999 calls, she stressed, go through to a regional centre and action dispatched from there,. Again, she said, that was a very effective system.,

The superintendent added however that the phone lines work off the internet and there are times when the internet goes down. Normally, it takes five to 10 minutes to come back up.

They would be tweaking the system to allow calls to be answered in other offices other than the front office, she explained.