Gardaí’s budget for PR and communications has boomed. Is that good?

An Garda Síochána's spend on PR grew nearly sixfold between 2019 and 2026, show figures released under the Freedom of Information Act. 

During that period, the annual budgets of its Corporate Communications Office (CCO) grew from €62,000 to €358,000.

Gardaí also bulked up the press office’s staffing, from 19 members in December 2019 to 31 in April 2026 – an increase of 63 percent.

Besides fielding questions from the press and sending out news releases, “An Garda Síochána's Office of Corporate Communications maintains the organisation's social media presence on Facebook, Twitter [X] and Instagram,” says the Gardaí’s website.

A spokesperson for An Garda Síochána said its budget upsurge was needed to ensure that the guards are “effectively” communicating with the public across a variety of channels. It has expanded its in-house skills, they said, adding more social media content creators.

The office also pushes recruitment drives and crime-prevention campaigns, they said.

Also, the press office sends out notices – last year it issued seven – to counter falsehoods and misinformation, whose target is often vulnerable groups, the spokesperson said.

Surveys show higher trust in the Gardaí, they said, quoting Andrew McLindon, the Gardaí’s director of communications, as saying that messaging is important to hold the public’s trust. "As well as supporting Garda operational activity that keeps people safe,” McLindon said.

Ciáran O’Connor, senior analyst at Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) – an organisation focused on probing hate and extremism online – said he has seen an improvement in Gardaí’s online messaging.

In the last two or three years, Gardaí have started to step in more at critical moments – like shortly after an incident unfolds – to refute common untruths and misinformation that carom through social media.

“We have seen the Gardaí become more vocal, more proactive in their communications in the immediate aftermath of events,” O'Connor said.

Meanwhile, some policing academics say inflating the police communications budget and expanding its press office isn’t entirely positive. It depends on how it is used.

If output steers the public’s perception of social issues in ways that demonise ordinary people – who can be struggling – that isn’t a good use of public money, they say.

An underlying problem, they say, is that An Garda Síochána, as an organisation, just isn't transparent enough. It's rare for the public to glimpse how things play out behind the scenes, including how the PR wing spends its money.

Setting the record straight

In October 2024, independent city Councillor Gavin Pepper shared a video of himself, talking to his phone’s camera, saying a “foreign national” had been confronted by a crowd of parents in Finglas – and that he’d been hauled away by the cops.

“The facts will come out later of what it was. But it is alleged that he was possibly talking to some of the kids, and it was the parents of the kids who had him surrounded until the police came,” he said.

Shortly after, An Garda Síochána sent out a notice.

A young man who struggled speaking English needed help contacting his family. He had been asking passersby near a school in Finglas if he could use their Wifi to make contact, its statement said. 

“This request for assistance was misinterpreted and led to a call from onlookers to the Gardaí,” it said. Officers took him away to help him contact his family, it said, and not because he had done anything wrong.

The statement urged public representatives, the general public, and the media to “independently verify the source of their information”.

O’Connor, the senior analyst at ISD, said the guards also stepped up when false allegations of sexual assault against immigrant men in Dungarvan in Co. Waterford floated on Facebook, and when all kinds of wrong information about a shooting in Carlow made it into social media feeds.

“I think it signals an improvement in their strategic communications and how they respond to potential information vacuums,” he said.

Cian Ó Concubhair, associate professor of criminal justice in Maynooth University, said that based on what he's seen, Gardaí's messaging hasn't dramatically improved. But a polarised world made a strategic adjustment to proactive social media messaging inevitable, he said. 

In the past, “they usually wouldn’t have responded to ongoing incidents”, he said.

Still, Ó Concubhair said, Gardaí were much slower than police in other countries to embrace this pivot.

It's been standard for as long as a decade in some places, he said. “The police saw that they have a responsibility to go on social media in order to correct the record as a kind of authoritative source of information."

Paying for “copaganda”?

In his book, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate our News, American civil rights lawyer Alec Karakatsanis says that journalists all over should ask police forces how much they spend on communications.

Police communications staff – alongside sympathetic reporters – can create content and place stories that inflate the significance of petty violations and crimes and largely ignore white-collar misdeeds and corruption, he says.

“There is a complex, and often hidden web of relationships – funded by public money – that manufactures and places police propaganda in the news,” he wrote.

Here, Gardaí have in past years placed stories – sometimes with video footage – about immigration arrests via checkpoints at the border with the North, saying how more people are using it to cross. 

Underneath one such video, a comment reads: “People were labelled far right when they suggested deportation a few month's back, are the government far right now”.

Gardaí allowed the Irish Examiner to video a deportation process last year – even while a human rights observer report of a deportation last year suggests that, at least for observers and escorts, recording the routine is not allowed.

At one point in 2023, Garda press office issued a statement about how, as part of a campaign to tackle inner-city crime and enhance safety, officers would carry out immigration checks in Dublin city.

At the time, Luna Lara Liboni, then a senior policy officer at the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL), said that the news release gave the impression that immigration and crime were intertwined – a common anti-immigrant trope. 

In an email last week, Karakatsanis, the author of Copaganda, said the most basic functions of police in an unequal society “are to control the most vulnerable and to preserve the wealth and power of those groups and institutions who benefit from unequal social arrangements”.

Police need money to influence the public’s perception and distract from that, he said.

Ó Concubhair, who has read Copaganda, said he has a more optimistic view. It's good to have a police force that is good at communicating with the public, he said.

Still, he finds things like “war on drugs” agendas and media campaigns distasteful and not a good use of public money, said Ó Concubhair.

He said the communications office can work to thwart unfavourable leaks, “control the flow of information” and nudge the press to promote its narratives.

“And leveraging their authority over journalists,” Ó Concubhair said.

Claire Hamilton, head of the School of Law and Criminology at Maynooth University, said that hyperfocusing on what people say about Gardaí on platforms such as X can also create a perception that people in real life don’t have any faith in the police. 

And that Gardaí need to spend a lot of money to change that, she said.

While satisfaction with its performance isn't as high, trust in the force is still strong compared to other European countries because “the guards are still very much associated with the establishment of, you know, the Republic, the Free State”.

Another problem, said Ó Concubhair, the other policing academic, is that aside from costs and personnel data, it’s not possible to scrutinise the politics and agendas of Gardaí, and hold them accountable.

Only records relating to those limited categories of information are available through access requests under the Freedom of Information Act. “Which is absolutely ridiculous,” he said.

Most government agencies struggle with transparency under FOI law, he said, but they still have to comply.

The transparency problem, Ó Concubhair said, "is most acute in the Gardaí".