More red tape or a better thin blue line?

A police authority will uncouple the close relationship between the justice minister and Garda commissioner, says Cormac O’Keeffe.

DESPITE being one of most fundamental changes to the structure of policing for decades, it has been largely sidelined in the heat and noise surrounding the Garda controversies.

But the Government’s decision to establish a new State body to regulate An Garda Síochána and sit between the force and the Government is, in the words of one leading academic, “a momentous” decision, if a surprising and sudden one.