Garda Commissioner Martin Callinan claims there is no political interference in the way the force is run and says he does not believe there is a need for an independent police authority to oversee it.

GARDA militancy has a long pedigree with the force’s industrial activists tracing their ancestry back to a meeting in the Macushla Ballroom in south Dublin on November 4, 1961.

Finally, Garda Commissioner Noel Conroy has spoken publicly about the recent Morris reports into alleged garda corruption in Donegal, in which the tribunal declared itself “staggered” by the level of indiscipline and insubordination it found in the force.