Police 'sent to stop bus after passenger refused to put packet of cheese and onion crisps away'

Daily Mail​

06-05-2025

Police in Ireland were reportedly sent to stop a bus after a passenger refused to put away a packet of cheese and onion crisps.
A woman on board the bus in Galway put a call in to the cops to complain about the smell of the crisps, according to the Irish Mirror.
She was reportedly left furious that another passenger was eating the snack on the bus and refused to put them away.
The passenger then bizarrely rang the police before the call taker directed two members of the force to go and investigate.
But the officers refused. 'The garda who took the call was directed to stop the bus and board it, but he refused as he did not believe it was a criminal matter,' a source said, as per Dublin Live.
The incident came during the week of the annual conference in Killarney, Co Kerry, of the 11,200-strong Garda Representative Association.
The association, which represents members of the force, heard claims that police are being sent to pointless calls – because of fears there would be complaints if they did not attend.
The conference heard that along with the crisp incident, officers had also recently been sent out to deal with a suicidal dog and a bird's nest.
Garda Dan Ryan, who represents officers in Carlow, said: 'Currently, there's no triage policy with the Control Room.
'We recently got dispatched to a call where a person rang in believing that her dog was suffering from mental health problems and was going to take his own life.
'Yet this was sent to us to deal with given the current policy that it's a call for service. We have to go to everything'.
He explained that officers had to go and speak to the owner and voiced concerns around members of the police force being taken out of action to deal with calls of this nature.
'You would receive calls like this quite occasionally, not specifically about suicidal dogs, but like kind of silly calls like those.
'There was another one there recently in south Kerry where someone rang in because there was a pheasant hanging around in a pub car park.
'It's a wild bird. What are we supposed to do there?, he asked.'
And Garda Peter Firth, from Waterford, also told the conference that there was a fear of cancelling such calls because personnel in control rooms were worried they would be disciplined.
He said: 'People are very slow to cancel calls because gardaí are worried that a member of the public might complain or that someone in management might perceive a call that we didn't attend as one we should have.
'Again it's a fear of discipline'.
Firth said the force are receiving calls around events which are not policing matters such as a birds nest in someone's house.
'A couple of lads in the southeast were sent because a neighbour called and said she was concerned about young birds' nest in someone's house and that they might not have been able to get out because the people were on holidays.
'Because we're not declining those calls, the requests become more acceptable over time, it becomes its own monster.
'The members in the control room have to make the decision and they have no faith in the policy that they won't be disciplined.
'There's a knock-on effect to that as well,' he said.
The police said in response to queries about such calls that the force had introduced a new computer-aided dispatch system known as GardaSAFE in 2023.
The force said in a statement: 'This new system enhances and improves our response and allows more efficient use of our resources thereby ensuring that the public receive the best possible response.
'GardaSAFE sees all calls requiring the dispatch of a Garda resource handled by a number of regionally located control centres.
'These control centres are staffed by trained call takers and call dispatchers.
'Community policing is the provision of a policing service to the whole community both urban and rural through a partnership based, proactive, problem solving style of policing.
'It is focused on community engagement, crime prevention and law enforcement and addresses crime and policing quality of life issues affecting communities.'