Gareth O'Callaghan: Society glorifies criminals while our gardaí are given no respect
Once upon a time when I was a boy, a garda called Pat Gibbon arrived in our area. He became known as Columbo, after the popular television police character. He had wavy brown hair and a slanted eye, just like Peter Falk.
Within weeks, he had become something of an enigma. You heard him before you saw him, long strides, and fists always clenched by his side. If he was smiling, it was a good day; if he threw that I’ll-have-you-for-lunch look, you stayed out of his way.
Parents liked him. You might see him at the school gates chatting to the young mothers, furtively gathering information with his engaging spiel. Young people weren’t sure what to make of him. He had a kind word for everyone he met, even the boot boys if they were behaving. Unlike other gardaí in the area, he wore his heart on his sleeve. He was what most elders today would call an old-fashioned cop from a bygone age.
He would drop into the classrooms unannounced, discussing the importance of schoolwork, or looking for information on individuals he wanted to talk to. The first time I heard the expression “known to gardaí” was during one of his school visits. He held up a bag of cannabis. It had been confiscated from a student who was now looking for another school to attend.
He extolled the importance of respect. “If you ever witness your father hitting your mother, tell me. You might just save your mother’s life,” he informed a shocked class. “A man who hits a woman isn’t a man.”
It was the first time I ever heard of domestic abuse.
He would often wear his uniform when attending Sunday Mass with his family.
Where other young kids might be mortified at the prospect of their father being the local sergeant, Pat Gibbon’s children were proud of their dad.
He was regularly seen leaving schools in the garda car after long meetings in the principal’s office, or sitting in the patrol car outside the local chip shop on a Saturday night, waiting for a fight to break out.
Pat Gibbon is long gone, but we were lucky to have him in our lives growing up. He was what you might call a reactive garda, the reason why most people want to make it their career.
Where are the Pat Gibbons in our Garda force today? Oh they’re there; it’s just becoming more difficult these days for a man or a woman to be the garda they thought they could be when they first joined, back when they believed they could make a real difference for the better in the lives of others.
Times are changing, but people don’t change. Much as we think we change, years of research shows we don’t. Aspects of our lives change according to circumstances, but at a basic level, each of us is exactly as we were 10, 20, 40 years ago. We are primitive and unpredictable creatures beneath all of the fake veneer.
Everyone has a dark side, a shadow self. Without the law, the collective shadow would explode, and society would collapse in anarchy. The far-right has proved it’s already happening. Without law enforcement, even for a short period, the social fabric would fail. As individuals, the gardaí are as vulnerable as any of us.
There is a major crisis within An Garda Síochána right now, worse than it ever was. In May 1998, 68% of the force in Dublin, and almost 100% in other areas of the country reported sick and didn’t turn up for work.
Twenty-five years on, the 98% vote of no confidence in the garda commissioner is a red flag never witnessed before — an omen that few people outside the force seem to be too concerned about, and that includes the Government.
Clearly, the gardaí and the commissioner are not in sync. When Drew Harris was appointed five years ago, a garda said to me: “This is never going to work.” When I asked him why, he replied: “You need to be a garda to understand.”
Former commissioner Noirín O’Sullivan retired in September 2017. Her reason for stepping down, she said, was because she was unable to devote time to the “deep cultural and structural reform that is necessary to modernise and reform an organisation of 16,000 people...” Drew Harris is pursuing the same, but you can’t reform an organisation of that magnitude without members’ full and collective support.
However, this is not football. It’s a dispute involving almost 13,000 gardaí and, following a landslide vote of no confidence, the GRA clearly have Harris in their sights.
Decent gardaí — there are many — are still paying a heavy price following the scandals of recent years, and for the disgusting behaviour of others who have destroyed the credibility of the organisation. It needs to be repaired, not reformed. Only time can do that. Its members are people, not robocops. And only the individuals, not the brand, can restore that lost trust and respect.
Sergeant Maurice McCabe bravely put his career and his reputation on the line when he blew wide open the hush-hush society of corruption and deceit that existed at the heart of sections of the Garda force for years. What followed was shocking beyond belief. Garda whistleblowers came forward with allegations of murders, abductions, and serious assaults that were not properly investigated.
Breaches of Garda policy were consistent and widespread. Has much changed?
Men and women don’t become gardaí to sit at desks. Administrative workloads should be tasked to civilian workers. A garda’s job is on the streets in a reactive role, not a proactive one.
I was in Heathrow recently. Walking through the terminal, I noticed two police officers, both heavily armed — one clasping a defence rifle, the other holding a German Shepherd on a short leash. The message was clear: assholes will not be tolerated. That’s called visible policing. I felt safe — a feeling that’s all too rare on the streets of our cities.
Members of the Garda’s Armed Support Unit should be out walking the streets instead of driving around in SUVs. Thugs need to feel threatened. It’s on street corners and in alleyways that pedestrians are being mugged and beaten up. On quiet side streets, the drug trade is thriving; addicts are shooting up, then dumping filthy needles and syringes on busy footpaths. I almost stepped on one recently, needle attached, close to where young children were playing.
There’s nothing like being confronted by two police officers carrying loaded weapons to make you contemplate life. Deploy them now. It’s not rocket science. Their presence will serve to support unarmed gardaí while easing the fear of pedestrians.
When Harris was appointed commissioner, Leo Varadkar described it as “a good day for Irish policing”. Five years later, 98% of gardaí disagree. For the Taoiseach to state recently that the government has full confidence in Drew Harris is an insult to gardaí everywhere.
If he doesn’t realise the message he is sending out, then someone should explain it to him.
We live in a society where we don’t give our criminals much punishment, but we give them loads of publicity. We’ve reached a low point in our cultural preferences when we think the television show is worthy of awards, considering it glorifies crime and evil. It cost RTÉ €20m to make the series, an amount equal to the starting salaries of over 500 new gardaí.
It’s a culture shock when you think about how equally popular used to be, back at a time when our streets felt safer because of gardaí like Pat Gibbon.
Heroes are people who give their lives to something bigger than themselves.
