Gardaí (Irish police) were instructed to disengage from pursuing a car as it drove in the wrong direction on a motorway before a fatal crash, the Garda Representative Association has said.
Five teenagers were killed in the head-on crash on the M9 in County Kildare on Sunday morning.
Two women are in a critical condition, while another woman and a seven–year-old boy are in a serious condition.
Assistant General Secretary of the Garda Representative Association (GRA), Tara McManus, told the that garda roads policing officers “do not have pursuit training”.
She said officers involved in the Kildare incident were given a command to “disengage” with the car after it took “evasive action”.
Ireland’s Minister for Justice Jim O’Callaghan said that the Garda Commissioner has said he would introduce pursuit training this year.
The crash happened on the M9 Northbound at Junction 3 at about 03:00 local time.
The five teenagers who died have been named locally as Joe Carthy from Athy, County Kildare, Alex McCarthy from Carlow, Kamil Pustkowski from Limerick, Jeremy O’Brien and Jack Kennedy, according to Irish broadcaster RTÉ News.
The injured family – two women aged in their 30s and one in her 20s, and the young boy – are understood to be from Carlow.
McManus said the teenagers had been in the car for a number of hours before the collision and gardaí had attempted to interact with them and bring the vehicle to a stop on “several occasions”.
She told NI’s Good Morning Ulster programme that officers deployed stinger devices in an attempt to stop the car, but it proceeded to travel in the direction of the motorway.
“At that stage our members would not continue in that pursuit and the directions that were given by our command and control centre were to disengage,” she said.
“That would be the normal procedure for us that we do not engage with a car that has decided to take that sort of evasive action.”