TWO UPGRADES to the Garda communications and CCTV networks have cost almost €9.5 million in the past five years.
The cost of upgrading the Garda internal telephone network on its Dublin metropolitan region and rural PABX networks amounted to €9.2 million, Minister for Justice Dermot Ahern said in response to a parliamentary question by Fine Gael’s Charlie Flanagan.
He said Garda authorities had informed him “the additional functionality provided by the upgraded systems will help to achieve savings through the elimination of costs associated with internal calls, a reduction in the cost of handling mobile telephone calls and a reduction in the number of direct lines required within stations”.
Meanwhile, a recently completed upgrade of the Garda CCTV system from analogue recording systems to digital cost €230,000 since the upgrade began in 2009, a separate parliamentary question by Alan Shatter revealed.
All Garda CCTV systems installed since 2007 were fitted with digital storage as standard.
However, systems installed before 2007 used VHS tapes to record images, a system which was labour-intensive, required a large amount of storage and meant that the quality of images deteriorated when tapes were constantly recorded over.
All the analogue recorders were subsequently replaced with digital equipment between 2009 and 2010, costing €230,000.
Nationwide there are 28 Garda town centre CCTV schemes operating 537 cameras. The systems use analogue cameras and a mix of fibre-optic and radio technologies to transfer the images to monitoring stations.
As well as the 500-plus Garda CCTV cameras, there are approximately 290 other cameras in operation through community CCTV schemes throughout the country.
The funding for these projects totals €6.3 million and has been provided through the Department of Justice and the Department of Community and Gaeltacht Affairs. These have provided €3.4 million and €2.9 million respectively to community CCTV schemes since 2006.