Garda too strong, yet too weak

4 0 April 2017

HE GARDA appears to be stumbling from crisis

to crisis. As Village was going to print Fianna

Fáil was considering a vote of no conﬁdence in

its management and the Government had

agreed a 'root and branch' review. It is now dif-

ﬁcult to keep account of all of the controversies that the

force has been embroiled in - or the associated inquiries.

The current difﬁculties with a million phantom breath

tests, and 14,700 wrongful convictions for motoring

offences, the ongoing tribulations of Garda management

in the mishandled controversy surrounding the Garda

whistleblower, Maurice McCabe, apparent misaccount-

ing in Templemore and rumours of false crime, including

murder and domestic-violence, statistics, are just the

latest in the downward spiral of scandals - but are noth-

ing new.

For most of the history of the new Irish state the suc

cess of the Garda force in presenting a neutral, unarmed

and publicly acceptable form of policing after a bitter

civil war has been the subject of wide-ranging favourable

commentary. However, in the modern era, certainly from

the 1980s onwards, the force has not coped well.

Vincent Browne recently recalled how, following the

murder of the British Ambassador Christopher Ewart-

Biggs in 1976, two gardaí who argued a ﬁngerprint

allegedly found on a helmet near the scene of the explo-

sion was not the suspect’s were moved out of the

ﬁngerprint unit and were effectively demoted. A subse-

quent inquiry into the affair led by the head of the

ﬁngerprint unit in Scotland Yard concluded that what

was done in the Ewart-Biggs case “endangered the sci-

ence of ﬁngerprinting worldwide”.

In 1977 Nicky Kelly, Osgur Breathnach and Brian

McNally, members of the then newly formed Irish Social-

ist Republican Party (IRSP) were convicted of committing

a £200,000 train robbery in Sallins, Co Kildare. The only

evidence against them was confessions they made while

in Garda custody and while in that custody there was

clear evidence that they had suffered signiﬁcant injuries.

More that 20 gardaí gave evidence in almost identical

phraseology that the accused were not assaulted in cus-

tody and that the confessions were voluntary. Kelly was

ultimately pardoned and the other two acquitted.

In many ways I am the last person to be critical of An

Garda Síochána. My own grandfather joined the force in

1922, rising to the rank of Chief Superintendent, was

shot at during the civil war and was compelled to carry

a revolver for most of his service career. The fact that my

father was a Minister from before I was born meant that

much of my parenting and early lessons in life were actu-

ally provided by my fathers two Garda drivers. They were

really part of our family and in many ways an inspiration

to us growing up. My grandfather's old dress uniform

hung in his bedroom wardrobe well into retirement and

we would gaze at it, as children, with great awe - its gold-

braid peaked hat and the Sam Browne belt with blue

whistle and tie.

Over the years in politics, business and in journalism

I have interacted with senior gardaí and never found

them wanting. In particular I found Garda Commission-

ers Pat Byrne and Fachtna Murphy to be exemplars of

professionalism and would go as far as to count them as

friends. Most of the gardaí I have spoken to, not the pre

viously mentioned I hasten to add, have been shocked

by revelations in the whistleblower affair.

Few understand how the current Commissioner can

retain her position, given that she must have known

about so many of the controversies that are undermin-

ing the force including the incendiary rumours that

were circulated about Maurice McCabe, including by

To regain conﬁdence, strengthen policing

and change leadership

POLITICS

by Conor Lenihan

Garda

too strong,

yet too weak

The same...

April 2017 4 1

senior members of the force. Though out of politics I

was also on the receiving end of these stories. When

the Garda want to put something out there they are not

shy about it.

One reason why the Garda has not made an easy tran-

sition into the modern era of more sophisticated crime

is because much of its work from 1969 onwards was

taken up by the demonstrable threat to the state

posed by the IRA. It gave a culture of

secrecy and stealth the upper hand

within the force. In a recent Irish

Times’ article Vincent Browne

claims: “Lawyers, acting for

accused persons associated

with illegal organisations,

stated repeatedly during that

time – ie in the 1970s and

1980s – that Garda perjury

was a regular feature of such

cases and, later, became

almost a constant feature of

many criminal trials, whether sub-

versive related or not. At no time was

there any inquiry into this or was any

Garda disciplined within the force in that con-

nection”. The same over-zealousness accounts for the

fact that it is now suspected that at least 2,800 non-999

calls were monitored, in 23 Garda stations, from 1980 to

2013. The Ian Bailey case currently advancing to the

French courts has aired serious allegations that gardaí

considered paying someone in order to frame Bailey for

murder. The instincts of many gardaí have been called

into question.

More generally in the JC case streetwise Supreme

Court Justice Adrian Hardiman rehearsed the critical

ﬁndings of tribunals of inquiry into Garda conduct and

cited recent “deeply disturbing developments” in rela

tion to the force and its oversight. “If the ordinary citizen

were provided with a defence of ‘I didn’t mean it’ or ‘I

didn’t know it was against the law’, then many parts of

the law would become completely unenforceable, he

noted.

The conﬂict in the North occasioned a corollary and

opposite problem: the resources that had to be devoted

to the conﬂict in Northern Ireland skewed the force’s

operations. While on the one hand the conﬂict engen-

dered some heavy-handed tactics, on the other it

reduced the force’s efﬁcacy, weakening it.

So, the Garda was late to counter the

threat posed by armed and well-

organised crime gangs. The fact

that for example the Kinahans

have become one of the big

gest drug gangs in Europe tells

its own story.

Symptomatic of the weak-

ness of the Garda was the

incident during the general

election last year where the

entire Kinahan gang were

allowed to openly move through

Dublin airport and around Dublin on

their return from Spain for a family

funeral. The Kinahans appeared to get VIP

treatment as they arrived, with the media lovingly tell-

ing us that they were given Garda protection en route to

the church and on their way around Dublin. This and the

incident at the Regency Hotel, in north Dublin, called for

a dramatic and robust response by the State. The sur-

prise is that there was no such visible response. Even

though there was an election under way the Minister

Frances Fitzgerald did not seem to grasp the unsettling

Most of the gardaí I have

spoken to have been

shocked and appalled

by the revelations into

the whistleblower

affair

...but different

4 2 April 2017

message the incident was sending to the voting public. In

years gone by ‘the General’ (Martin Cahill) was the sub-

ject of around-the-clock surveillance that bordered on

intimidation and harassment but was needed to keep

him under pressure. The impetus for such attentions

has, for some reason, been lost latterly, even as foreign

assassins arrive in our ganglands.

The murder of journalist Veronica Guerin spurred an

immediate and far-reaching response. Neither the Garda

nor this government seem to have realised that the inci-

dents involving the Kinahans was a similar opportunity

to assert themselves for the forces of law and order. Fine

Gael has always prided itself as one of these, but under

Enda Kenny it has, in effect, undermined the Garda in a

very public way. The manner in which Garda Commis-

sioner Martin Callinan was removed showed a

government that was more interested in shielding itself

than in serving the public interest in policing. While both

the Minister and the Secretary General or the Depart-

ment of Justice were also moved on eventually it seemed

likely this was being done for all of the wrong reasons -

in short to protect the Taoiseach.

What has never been addressed has been the whole

structure of Garda management which is clearly no

longer ﬁt for practice. Some years ago a tough, no non-

sense, Inspector of the Garda was appointed - Kathleen

O'Toole had reformed the way the Boston Police force

operated and introduced zero tolerance. She was an

impressive person and many in government felt she

should have been elevated to the role of Commissioner.

Recent years have seen instigation of Ombudsman Com-

mission, the Garda Inspectorate and the Policing

Authority but the culture at the top is awry and new over-

sight and new strategies can never change that.

The arguments for having an outside appointment as

Garda Commissioner is now doubly relevant. In the wake

of the ﬁnancial crisis an outsider, Matthew Elderﬁeld,

was brought in to improve the regulation and new sys-

tems of regulation for the ﬁnancial services sector.

Across the water in the UK the then Chancellor of the

Exchequer George Osborne, braved the obvious criti-

cism, by appointing the former governor of the Canadian

Central Bank, Mark Carney, to the exclusive position of

Governor of the Bank of England. It took Chris Patten, an

Englishman, to drive the instigation of a new police in

Northern Ireland after the RUC failed to attract cross-

community support and was awarded its P45, and the

George Cross.

Thankfully the job of now restructuring the Garda is

not as great as putting the Northern Ireland Police Force

together. Society in the Republic of Ireland is till rela-

tively sympathetic to the Garda force and strong

leadership at the top of the organisation should be able

to repair the damage done by recent controversies.

Having lived and worked abroad in recent years, I feel

Ireland should have a more robust form of policing than

it currently has. In 1997 the Fianna Fáil party went into

the election promising zero-tolerance-style policing. For

political reasons and in fear of the potential subversion

of civil liberties, the governments led by Bertie Ahern

backed away from zero tolerance. This was a historic

mistake which inured the Garda against more thorough-

going policing reform in the public interest allowing it to

languish unreformed.

Largely because of the troubles our once-exemplary

Garda became both under- and over-zealous. I await a

root-and-branch review but in any event it needs to

regain its scruples to satisfy the imperatives of civil lib-

erties, probity and decency. Moreover, many

commentators forget, it also must improve the effective-

ness with which it deals with crime, if it is to regain

popular trust.

Conor Lenihan is a former Dáil Deputy of 14 years and a

former Minister in the Department of Justice.

POLITICS

Much of the Garda’s work from 1969 was

taken up by the IRA threat creating a

culture of secrecy and stealth but also

diverting and weakening it

Murder of Veronica Guerin, 1996

Commissioner O'Sullivan with Paul Williams