A Garda-run upload portal for video footage of road traffic offences is set to be delayed again.
Both the Irish Independent and RTE are reporting the timeline without reporting that it’s a delay.
IrishCycle.com previously covered how, rather than following the practice in other countries of having online reporting alongside uploading of footage, Gardaí will only provide the upload function to people who report the road traffic offence separately.
This website reported that the then Minister for Justice, Simon Harris said in April 2023 that the system would be in place in 2024 “at the earliest”, by December 2023, with Helen McEntee back in the Minister for Justice seat it had changed to that it is “envisaged that the introduction of such an online portal will be during 2025”.
Today, the Irish Independent are reporting that Paula Hilman, Assistant Garda Commissioner with responsibility for roads policing said: “The issue we have is that it won’t be realistically launched until about 2026 because at the back end, you need a digital evidence management system, and that’s what we need to develop.’
RTE are reporting how Superintendent Liam Geraghty told them it would be available to the public in “18 months to 24 months”.
Superintendent Geraghty said: “When that rolls out, people will be able to upload footage, but we will still require the people who are uploading that footage to make a statement to prove the authenticity of the footage.”
The portal will also be used for when Gardaí make public calls for dashcam or other footage.
So is this any different from the present, where an incident is reported to a Garda station or traffic watch, followed by e-mailing or bringing the footage in on a disk, making a statement (with the step of bringing in or e-mailing the footage being replaced with some sort of over complicated web based service, that will probably only work on a desktop, with a legacy browser?
This makes it look like the Gardai really do not want to prosecute dangerous drivers.