A police force without public trust can’t fight crime

It’s impossible to overstate the importance of the Irish public to An Garda Síochána. It’s not all CSI and DNA-profiling. A significant number of crimes are solved thanks to the information given by the person on the street, writes Clodagh Finn

IF masterful wordsmith Flann O’Brien were still around — and what a shame he’s not — he might survey the wreckage of the recent garda controversies and say: “It is nearly an insoluble pancake, a conundrum of inscrutable potentialities, a snorter.” There are skewed crime statistics, 14,700 wrongful motoring convictions, financial irregularities, a million missing breathalyser tests – and a man elected to the Irish parliament who believes bushes kill people on our roads, not alcohol.

Come to think of it, perhaps those last two things are connected. Did the gardaí use the phantom tests to breathalyse one million bushes? Who knows? After all, they may as well, because as Deputy Danny Healy-Rae assures us: “Nobody caused a fatality by having three glasses of Guinness drank.” I know, ridiculous, but we are living in a parallel world where the ridiculous reigns – a real-life version of O’Brien’s The Third Policeman – Kafkaesque, meandering, fact-bending, though, alas, not anywhere near as interesting.