[article] Dart delayed after brawl breaks out in carriage
 

http://www.independent.ie/irish-news...-31389293.html

Caught on twitter https://twitter.com/ChristineBohan/s...72747979468802

Being discussed on the Last Word now.

+ 1 for a dedicated Garda Public Transport unit.

I'm not so sure if a dedicated transport unit is the answer in Ireland given how thinly spread they would be. The British Transport Police is a quarter the size of entire Garda. At best we'd be talking about a couple of hundred officers with maybe 40 or 50 on duty for the entire country at any one time given the proportional size of our police serices. If Dublin has half of these, then a response to an issue in Maynooth is hardly going to be any quicker than if it was using the general force.

What needs to happen is a better prioritisation for response time for public transport issues among the general police force. Perhaps it might also be worth considering allowing for a higher qualification level for some private security that would grant them the right to detain offenders on a train to allow the train to continue while the security guard remains with them. This should be safe enough from a civil liberties perspective given the level of CCTV coverage on trains and in stations and the officers themselves could be issue with body cameras.

But the real issue is that people are not being punished for this kind of behaviour. No arrests were made despite the fact that drinking is supposed to be banned on the DART system and this would also seem to be a textbook case of drunk and disorderly. What is the point of banning drinking on trains when the only person who obeys the law is the proverbial little old lady with her quarter bottle of white wine.

In the Dublin area there is certainly justification for a transport police.

Far too often the garda response time to incidents has been excessive, the Ashtown incident with the fare evader with a history of violence is a case in point no garda was available to attend and the train had to be taken out of service causing great disruption and diverted to docklands where the gardai showed up.

As Irish Rail security is subcontracted they have none of the powers (and protections) an Irish Rail employee has under the bye laws, transport acts and rail safety act.

Punishment is fairly easy, fine per bye law, court order to ban off all trains for 5 years and file a civil claim for cost of disruption/damage

That said it would be much simpler if staff at Bray, Connolly and elsewhere enforced some order and turned people away carrying alcohol or who have forgotten their clothes

The fact is that it is pretty complicated to set up a transport police unit and you'd probably end up with a worse service in the end as the regular guards would just wash their hands of everything to do with transport and the whole thing would descend into a mess of turf wars. If the guards don't want a transport police (and the evidence suggests they don't), then organisationally they will drag their heels on supporting it if it is rammed through. A transport police force of about 300 (based on the proportional size of the BTP relative to UK police numbers), is simply too small to cover the entire country and operate as a viable unit.

A public transport unit operated within the garda would probably end up a lot more efficient as it would need a lot less management (no need for IT, HR, training officers), etc.

It would be a lot simpler, cheaper and quicker to either give STT security the powers of an Irish Rail employee or just take the security back in-house.

I agree 100% with the last point. Irish Rail staff at Connolly do have an awful habit of looking the other way as some of the rougher elements go through the station - I guess they fancy making it home for the evening rather than ending up in the Mater. I would say that there is one particular STT employee who patrols the concourse at Connolly that seems to be pretty effective.

Really? I can't find anything in the transport acts to back that up. They only mention officers appointed by the board, there's no reference to employees.

Ask an RPU staff member and they will show you their authorisation from the board.

Its a small leather pouch with a brass warrant