The Garda is working on a major policing plan for the Ireland-Israel soccer game in Dublin later this year, with strategic commanders appointed and plans to ensure any violence does not get “out of control”.
Garda Commissioner Justin Kelly said the fixture would take place during Ireland’s presidency of the EU and just after a mooted visit by US president Donald Trump, all of which posed policing and security challenges.
The Garda was still considering whether it would request police officers from other countries to be on the ground in Ireland to bolster its counter drone capabilities, especially during the EU presidency in the second six months of this year.
However, the Garda had counter drone technology for a number of years and had “worked hard” over the last 12-18 months to build that capacity. It would be deployed, not just at Dublin Airport as visiting politicians arrived, but also at any location where key meetings took place.
“I am absolutely confident that what we have in place around the EU presidency will be on par with any of our law enforcement colleagues,” Kelly said, when asked about plans to combat drone incursions, especially after drones were flown close to the flight path of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s aircraft as it approached Dublin last year.
“Whether we’ll have officers from other police forces … We’ve had that in the past, we may have (again during the EU presidency), we haven’t made final decisions on that. But we will certainly have the capacity and the capability to deal with (drones) up to a law enforcement standard.”
Though the Ireland-Israel Nations League fixture in Dublin would not take place until October 4th, significant protests with the capacity for violence are already anticipated. Policing plans are being formulated, Kelly said, speaking to the media at a meeting of the Policing and Community Safety Authority Ireland in Dublin on Thursday.
“This particular match is going to have a lot of unique challenges to it, for sure,” he said. “We will have a significant placing plan in place for this. We’ll have a strategic and tactical commander, highly trained senior officers in place for the planning of this. We will have a significant amount of resources and equipment around this whole event.
“We’ve invested heavily around public order equipment. We’ll do lots of messaging before this. And if people want to go and they want to watch the match, or if people want to go and protest peacefully, that’s absolutely fine.
“But if people go to that event and commit criminal acts we will deal with that, we’ll make arrests, whatever we have to do. But we have a lot of experience in dealing with challenging events and we’ve done some very challenging matches previously.”