Who Is Monitoring The Nations Pulse

The Garda PULSE computer sytem was first introduced 17 years ago and as yet has only been rolled out to half the operational Garda stations in the country. The system was introduced at a cost of tens of millions of Euro and today continues to cost the Irish Tax Payer tens of millions of Euro per year to maintain. 30 million per year is being spent on Consultants contracts for PULSE and other Gardai IT systems, this cost does not include the Garda internal IT Unit, which runs into millions when salaries and running costs are accounted for.

Consultancy firm Accenture is receiving more than €13 million a year for its work across the Garda computer network. The US company is leading the PULSE project and has a stake in all the intellectual property associated with the system. It has also received multimillion euro sums for upgrading the automatic fingerprint identification system. Rival consultancy firm BearingPoint was paid €4.5 million for ten different Garda IT projects in 2007. Microsoft Ireland Operations, a subsidiary of the US software giant, received a total of €2.5 million in 2007, of which €2.1 million consisted of IT software licences. PULSE which has only been installed in 319 of the 703 Garda stations, is costing the state more than €1 million a month.
PULSE was only to be accessed by a member of An Garda Siochana if for example a person was stopped for drink driving, the arresting Garda could feed in the details of the person detained and the Garda could determine if that person was already banned from driving etc. The PULSE system was really all about making the detection and prevention of crime easier with a universal system in place. However, theirishobserver.blogspot.com has discovered that some Garda members are making money from the PULSE system by using the system to vet potential clients for Property Letting Agents etc. So for example a letting agent advertising in the local paper that they have a list of vetted clients on their books, they mean exactly that, a Garda has used his position to put names of potential tenants into the PULSE system to see if they have a criminal record, the Garda in turn gets paid cash for his work. This now appears to be common practice around the country and some Letting Agents are making no secret of where their information is coming from.
The question then remains to be asked - "Who is Monitoring The Nations Pulse", have An Garda Siochana no internal mechanism for detecting such abuse of a system that has cost the tax payer tens of millions, can nobody ask why the name of Joe Bloggs was feed into the computer on a Saurday night when Joe Bloggs was never arrested nor even suspected of committing any crime.