Good gardaí let themselves down by not pointing out rotten apples

THE protection of children in Ireland depends to a considerable extent on the skill and efficiency of the Garda Vetting Office. Based in Thurles, its 30 or so members provide an invaluable service to organisations working with children and vulnerable adults.

By endless trawling through records, and more detailed investigation when necessary, they help to ensure that people with any sort of established history that would make them dangerous to children are less likely to get through the net.

The system is by no means perfect. It needs more resources and better access to overseas information. And even if it were much better resourced, vetting alone is never an ultimate guarantee that people who want to prey on children can be prevented from doing so.

But the gardaí who operate the vetting system take their work seriously. They are good servants of the public.

I know and admire their work from personal experience, just as I know and admire the work of other, more senior gardaí. As chairman of Special Olympics in Ireland, I can let you into a secret. It’s no exaggeration to say that the growth of Special Olympics in Ireland, to the point where the organisation was able to engage the hearts and minds of the entire community in the island, was due in no small measure to the commitment and support of two policemen — Peter Fitzgerald, Garda deputy commissioner, and Duncan McCausland, PSNI assistant chief constable.

Together they have built an amazing support network for Special Olympics throughout the island and, in the process, have managed to use us to help them to forge much stronger relations between their two police services.

Knowing their work and commitment, it came as no surprise to me that Peter Fitzgerald, in particular, was listed among a number of gardaí who received special praise and commendation in the latest Morris Tribunal reports.

And it is worth pointing out that Morris didn’t damn all gardaí. I’m not saying that because it’s usually considered necessary to be nice to the guards — Morris himself says it in his findings.

Talking about a number of individual policemen, Morris says, “the extraordinary work that such officers can do when applied to tasks as seemingly impossible as the once startling homicide rate in Limerick, aspects of the drug problem in Dublin and the search for proper standards and methods of policing is a source of pride to An Garda Síochána and to the country. The same comment applies to those hundreds of men and women who do routine tasks of policing fairly and with a sense of commitment to their community on a daily basis. They are the officers upon whose professionalism the future of the force can, and should, be built”.

And these are the police officers who are let down by the behaviour of others. But more importantly than that, these decent, honest professionals let themselves down by their silence. Because one of the most striking things to emerge from Morris is this culture of silence — perfected by the Mafia in the term ‘omerta’. It’s ironic, of course, because the Mafia use omerta — where breach of the code of silence is punishable by death — to keep information from the police.

As a citizen of a democracy, you can’t read sentences like the following without a deep sense of unease: “The Tribunal has been staggered by the amount of indiscipline and insubordination it has found in the Garda force. There is a small, but disproportionately influential, core of mischief-making members who will not obey orders, who will not follow procedures, who will not tell the truth and who have no respect for their officers”.

It’s important to make the point that Morris himself makes several times in his report. That couple of sentences I’ve quoted above are part of the general conclusion he has come to about the gardaí — it’s not just about a few rotten apples in Donegal. The sentences are added to his more specific, and just as horrifying, findings in relation to the events he has been investigating in Donegal where he refers to a “disgraceful conspiracy to pervert the course of justice” carried out by named gardaí in an attempt to frame members of the travelling community and then cover up the framing. And this, of course, is only the latest in a string of such conspiracies in Donegal.

JUDGE MORRIS has now issued a number of reports, each one dealing with a specific aspect of his terms of reference. But again and again he has returned to a general theme — and stresses his right and obligation to do so.

“Of the gardaí serving in Donegal, it cannot be said that they are unrepresentative or an aberration from the generality”, he observes. “All of them were trained as gardaí and served under a uniform structure of administration and discipline that is standardised throughout the country”.

There is a single thread of unease running through these reports, almost as if Judge Morris believes, but can’t bring himself to say, that things are already out of control in the gardaí. If that is the case, we are in deep trouble.

And it has to be said that there is nothing whatever reassuring about the official reactions by the various representative organisations that claim to speak for different ranks within the Garda Siochána. From grudging silence to outright rejection, the reaction at a variety of levels suggests that the culture of omerta has still to be penetrated.

But penetrated it must be. There have been a number of suggestions over the weekend about changes and reforms that are necessary.

Anticipating Morris’s call, the Minister for Justice has outlined a new garda disciplinary procedure that will, if it ever happens, introduce some greater accountability. Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny has called for a new injection of professionalism by the ability to recruit senior ranks from outside the force. Pat Rabbitte, more pertinently, has called for the establishment of a civilian Garda Authority and the application of Freedom of Information legislation.

I’d support all that, but I’d also go a bit further. A culture change is what’s required, and to achieve that there needs to be some root-and-branch reform. For a start, the gardaí need to stop thinking of themselves as a ‘force’ altogether, and start thinking of themselves as a ‘service’.

Changing the name of the RUC to the Police Service of Northern Ireland had a profound effect on the internal dynamics and culture of that organisation, and we could do a lot worse than follow that lead as a first step.

The Garda website — whose opening page, incidentally, describes the gardaí as “Ireland’s national police service” — talks about their proud unarmed tradition, “equipped only with a modest wooden truncheon”.

And it quotes Commissioner Michael Staines, the first Garda Commissioner, who said: “The Garda Síochána will succeed not by force of arms or numbers, but by their moral authority as servants of the people”. Isn’t it time to revisit that thought before it’s too late?