Kenny’s response to the Garda crisis will define his legacy

As any Sir Humphrey Appleby, GCB, KBE, MVO, MA (Oxon) worthy of his or her Leinster House access-all-areas pass will confirm, the best way to kill off persistent, difficult ideas is to exile them to the never-never land of consultation, to divert them up endless cul-de-sacs and, eventually, watch them drown in a quagmire of earnest, impractical reports or costings.

Despite all of the inquiries, all of the pressing reports in preparation, all of the anticipated interrogations and great frustration around the collapse of Garda credibility, the Department of Justice’s loss of its moral authority and our dysfunctional administration of justice and policing, despite even a justice minister’s and a Garda commissioner’s resignation, Sir Humphrey’s age-old ploy of delay and conquer cannot be allowed to work this time.

This must be asserted despite what seems a newfound energy and enthusiasm at the highest levels to at last, at long last, confront the issues highlighted so shockingly in the Morris Report a decade ago and repeated so publicly and so very disastrously in recent months.

There is no suggestion of a Sir Humphrey at work — but then the good ones always operate far, far below the radar — but the issues are too important to pretend that the usual diversions and deferrals can even be offered much less tolerated. That the government response to the Morris Report — the 2005 Garda Act — has been shown to be utterly inadequate, utterly unequal to the task of protecting the great majority of gardaí from the corrupt and criminally indifferent minority in their ranks is argument enough for that demand.

However, the fact that our policing system has been exposed as a shadow of what it should be, or what we imagined it to be, has turned the challenge of rebuilding public confidence in the police service — not “force” as Clare Daly TD correctly points out — and our justice system has become the legacy issue of Taoiseach Enda Kenny’s Government. That Mr Kenny has involved himself so very directly in the unfolding events suggests that he accepts this reality despite even our great economic difficulties. That the Garda/justice crisis is entirely homegrown adds to that argument; that the solution will be entirely homegrown confirms it.

It might be tempting to invite a wide range of consultations on the obvious issues, and there will have to be some, but a sweeping, almost open-ended process would suit the Sir Humphrey’s and the status quo. Far better to build a mandatory review, every three or four years say, into whatever changes come about because of recent scandals. The long-awaited police authority will be established later this year and it may be the agency to lead any such review.

In many ways the engineering, the modus operandi of the process, to recover the integrity essential to policing and the administration of justice are almost side shows. What is important is intent, the determination to bring about the positive change the very great majority of people in this country want. It has been said before but it bears reiteration — it is time for Mr Kenny and his colleagues to justify the mandate they were so freely given three years ago. Anything less, as he must know, would be a failure.