Tens of thousands of criminal suspects are at large after failing to appear in court, with Gardaí unable to track the perpetrators down in over a year.
Since 1968, there have been 24,618 bench warrants issued which went unfulfilled for over a year.
As well as these warrants, there are an additional 9,659 which are less than a year old – 34,277 across Ireland.
Notably, 22,328 of these came from Dublin alone.
A bench warrant, issued by a judge, allows police to arrest a suspect at will if they have failed to appear before the courts.
However, many thousands of suspects have apparently evaded police detection for a year or more.
These include individuals charged with serious crimes, such as theft, fraud, threatening behaviour, assault and more.
The figures were revealed by Justice Minister Helen McEntee during a Parliamentary Question.
McEntee said that executing warrants is “a long-standing issue for many police services around the world; notably relating to persons actively seeking to evade detection and where limited identification information might be available to support enforcement.”
While McEntee did not elaborate on this, suspects with “limited identification information” would include so-called “undocumented” migrants in breach of Irish immigration law, about whom little or nothing is known.
In 2019, a six-year long immigration scam was discovered in which a Garda stamped fraudulent Visa papers for as many as 1,000 illegal migrants, taking bribes of €10,000 each in return.
While Gardaí attempted to track down the migrants after the fact, many of them were found to have “disappeared” into society.
Fears over ‘immigration scam’ after garda ‘took bribes to stamp fake visa papers’
Notably, McEntee has spearheaded an initiative to provide thousands of illegal migrants amnesty and residency rights to stay in Ireland.
Gript recently reported on a case of a violent serial sex offender who violated his sentencing conditions and was still openly wandering the streets in broad daylight months after he was ordered to self-deport by a judge.
EXCLUSIVE: Sex offender spotted in Ireland 2 months after “deportation”
Not only did the individual in question not leave the country as required, but he has apparently not been asked to serve the remaining two and a half years in jail after breaching the judge’s orders.