Roadsigns
Channel: Mark Dennehy
Date: 2015-03-26

The Joint Oireachtas Committee on Justice were meeting in public session with the Garda Commissioner about the policing plan for the next few years. Deputy McGrath took the opportunity to ask her some daft questions about legal firearms ownership (most of the answers to which he's been told repeatedly before this meeting). A review of Irish firearms licencing law is another topic that the same Committee is discussing at the moment and McGrath has been trying to get into the press as an anti-gun pro-public-safety advocate, and making an eejit of himself in the process; this is the latest incident in that train wreck.

He held up a photo of a roadsign that has clearly been shot at close range with a shotgun, said it was sent to him by a constituent and that it had been shot by a legally held firearm in Ireland (a "high powered rifle" no less) and did the Commissioner think there was a problem here?

And nobody commented on how the sign is a UK sign.


http://www.broadsheet.ie/2015/03/26/a-shot-in-the-dark
http://www.thejournal.ie/finian-mcgrath-guns-2014273-Mar2015/



 
http://www.broadsheet.ie/2015/03/26/a-shot-in-the-dark/#comment-1336163
http://www.thejournal.ie/profile/23603/to-serious-secondfirstly-yes-ive-seen-done-irish-3605212/

To be serious for a second:
Firstly, yes, I’ve seen this done to Irish road signs. Usually way out in the middle of nowhere and mostly over in the west. I’ve never, ever seen it done to a road sign in Dublin county, let alone Dublin city or Fingal, which is McGrath’s constituency. But yes, it’s an incredibly dangerous and stupid thing to do, and if anyone was ever caught doing it, they’d be for the high jump on at least six seperate offences.

But McGrath was holding up that sign as evidence that this happens and that that’s a reason to back the Garda proposals for altering the Firearms Act, and there are two main problems with that. Firstly, there’s the fact that it’s a UK road sign, which means he’s paying more attention to his mustache than he is to actual evidence (and the PrimeTime story from a few days ago shows that too). And secondly, the Garda proposals would have no impact on this because they have nothing to do with it. They don’t introduce any new offence for roadsign shooting because they don’t have to – there are already at least six seperate offences covering that (vandalism, destruction of public property, reckless discharge of a firearm, target shooting outside of an authorised range, shooting while less than 60 feet from a road, and breaching the terms of your licence), some of which have been on the Irish lawbooks since 1851. The proposals don’t introduce any measure that would stop this kind of thing, nor do they put more Gardai on patrol to catch someone doing it.

On top of that, the meeting was to discuss the Policing Plan 2015. The committee’s had other meetings with the Gardai to discuss firearms legislation, both in the Dail and in Garda HQ and McGrath didn’t even show up to half of those, let alone raise this issue at them. And then he hijacked this meeting on a more important topic to get in a bit of sensationalist shouting to get into the papers.

Irish laws on gun control are more than strict enough; but you have to have Gardai out there enforcing them and we’ve been cutting back on their funding and numbers too much. You want to stop this kind of thing? Fund the Gardai. It’s the only thing we know of that actually does affect gun crime. Writing new laws while the old ones go unenforced for lack of resources does absolutely nothing other than let TDs say in the press that they’re doing something. It’s legislative masturbation – lots of fun for the TD involved, but it doesn’t really do anything for anyone else.