Police policing police is a joke

IN 2004, PrimeTime featured the story of a young Wicklow man who claimed he had been assaulted in garda custody.

What marked out this story was the intervention of a politician. The young man’s family, respectable and middle-class, knew Wicklow TD Dick Roche, then a junior minister, now Minister for the Environment.

The morning after the alleged assault in September 2000, the family had asked Roche to come to their home to see the injuries for himself.