The ghosts of time past will have the place to themselves

FIRST it was the green men, and now it will be no men at all.

Thirty years ago the green men popped up all over rural Ireland when opening times in Garda stations were curtailed.

If you needed an officer in an emergency, you went to the station where the green man put you in touch with the nearest available station. The green man was thus described in Dáil Éireann by the then justice minister in March 1984 as the scheme was rolled out.

“The green man is a kind of box with a mesh in it. You pull a lever and it gets you through to the central Garda station.”

At the time, Michael Noonan was defending the curtailing of hours in stations as a necessary move, both financially and organisationally. There was mild resistance to this change, charges that it amounted to an attack on rural Ireland. But neither the change, nor the resistance, was anything compared to the latest downgrade — the closure of 95 stations from next week.

On the face of it, there is an overwhelming case for the closures. Up until last year there were 703 Garda stations in the State, more or less the same number as existed at Independence.

There had been no change in response to the urbanisation of society over the last 90 years, nothing that would suggest ownership of the car developed to the point of proliferation. By comparison, the jurisdiction of Northern Ireland has 86 police stations, and Scotland, with a population of 5.3 million has 340.

Here, when the dust has settled on the closures, there will still be 564, which compares well.

The Minister for Justice Alan Shatter has insisted that these changes are for operational rather than financial reasons. That may be the case, but the fact that such a network has endured right through the last century shows how politically explosive any closures would have been. By right, many should have been closed over the last 30 years, but the political will to do so never existed. Now, at a time when the State is bankrupt, it seems that Shatter is determined not to waste a good crisis. There may be logic in the actions, but like many other cuts, it couldn’t have come at a worse time.

Rural Ireland is under attack, from demographics, from economics, from societal change and even from globalisation. Now a powerful symbol of the community is being removed from its midst. The sense of despair that rural Ireland is being tossed onto the bonfire of austerity is entirely understandable.

Fears that the closures will lead to greater level of crime appear to be misplaced, but only time will tell. Most of the stations being closed were only manned for a few hours of the day. At the time when fear of crime is at its greatest, the stations were in darkness and deserted. In the vast majority of cases, the gardaí assigned to the station didn’t live in the immediate areas.

But great symbolism attached to having the Garda insignia over a building. It provided peace of mind. It held out the possibility that at some point of the day an officer would emerge and walk or drive among the community, providing a reassuring presence at a time of great insecurity.

The plan under which the closures are happening deigns that rural areas will still be patrolled, but now many will be under the impression that the officers are merely passing through, visiting, rather than engaging in the community.

And it is that presence, often little more than symbolic, that will be the greatest loss when the stations’ doors no longer open. It’s something that should not be underestimated, and it requires attention from the powers that be. A serious effort must be made to address fears, real or imagined, that large tracks of rural Ireland will become an afterthought for the gardaí.

Over the last few years we have seen the fears articulated over the closure of provincial hospitals. Local people simply don’t believe that the alternative, a network of centres of excellence, will provide a better service for all.

In the area of policing, there will be a major obligation on the force to show that this new way will be better than the system that has persisted for over a century. The people of rural Ireland deserve no less.

The world in which the Garda barracks was the focal point of a rural community, as depicted by John McGahern, is long gone. All that remains from those days are the bricks and mortar. And from next week, as the last lights go out, and doors are shut forever, the ghosts of time past will have the place to themselves.