We hear a lot about bad cops ... let’s hear it for good ones like Colm Horkan and Drew Harris

Garda chief knows pain of officer’s family. His own policeman father was murdered by IRA, writes Malachi O’doherty

In the diocese of Achonry at a Sunday afternoon funeral, a police chief stands to address the congregation. He honours the name of Colm Horkan, a Garda detective who was shot with his own gun last week in Castlerea in Co Roscommon.

Drew Harris told the congregation that detective Horkan was a good and decent police officer who took his work seriously. The first attribute that he listed in his praise of the man was “approachable”.

And he praised him for being part of two communities, policing and the GAA.

Harris looked genuinely stricken, perhaps thinking there about something some in the congregation would not have known: that his own father, a policeman too, was murdered when Drew was in his early 20s.

Alwyn Harris, a chief superintendent, had been described by Father Denis Faul as just the kind of police officer we needed — fair, decent and professional. Faul was a scathing critic of police and Army excesses and the police did not expect compliments from him.

The Provisional IRA murdered Alwyn Harris when he was travelling to church while on sick leave with a heart condition (I take these details from Lost Lives).

Republicans regarded him as a ‘combatant’ and would apply the same term to the sneak who attached the bomb to the car and was perhaps safe in his bed before it went off. It applies to neither of them. Policing isn’t warfare and killing by booby-trap isn’t a trial of strength.

Drew Harris had been a policeman himself for six years when his father was killed. The bomb under the car also injured his mother, though not seriously.

The RUC is routinely vilified in social media and propaganda as an evil that this society suffered.

Denis Faul, who knew about bad cops, knew also that there were good ones.

What Drew Harris conveyed in his praise for Colm Horkan was a deep sense that policing is a vocation. There are people who want to be police officers from the same kind of motivation that makes someone else want to be a nurse or a teacher.

He said also that he wanted the family to know that An Garda Siochana, the force he leads, will continue to be available to them as a support.

At the end of the Mass there was the ritual folding of the Irish flag over the coffin. Harris then presented the tricolour to Horkan’s father.

To take this a bit out of context, for this has nothing to do with what the mourners were concerned with, Harris’s language and gestures have meaning in Northern Ireland and in relation to the divisions here.

They seriously complicate the simple story of sectarian division and the story of the police as a dark force. They have the potential to change thinking.

I have no idea what Harris’s religious beliefs are. He did not say anything prayerful in his eulogy. But he comes out of a northern British culture and a policing tradition primarily concerned for much of his life with surviving and curtailing paramilitaries.

Three-dozen more police officers were murdered after the day Alwyn Harris was killed before the end of the Troubles.

An Garda Siochana, of course, was never the enemy of the RUC, though there were some members who colluded with the IRA and there were times also when the British Government believed that the Republic was dilatory in its efforts to counter IRA violence.

The flag that Harris presented to the father of Colm Horkan is one that was adopted as a badge of the republican cause. It would hardly be surprising if someone whose father was killed by the IRA would wince a little at the sight of it.

He will have seen it often enough waving from lampposts in republican areas where it was not safe for the RUC to patrol.

I grew up with ambiguous feelings about the police myself. Perhaps most people do because everybody stretches the law a little and is therefore wary of them. When you see the police coming to your door you expect to hear bad news.

Some of my neighbours as a child on a west Belfast housing estate were in the police. They cycled to work at Dunmurry RUC station. These were nice people, as far as a child can judge. I played with their children. They all moved away at the start of the Troubles for their own safety.

For some, the move didn’t save them.

My sister married a policeman, a lovely guy called Eddie, but I could only socialise with him well away from home, and though he came up to Andersonstown occasionally, this was a reckless thing to do. He died in his 30s from a brain haemorrhage.

The oddest thing about Eddie being a cop was that you could never imagine him hitting anyone over the head with a baton. He was one of the most gentle people I have known, hilariously funny. He had me doubled up with laughter at times. In some ways he was just a big child. And he had funny dark stories about policing. One of them concerned the discovery of a body floating in a river that bordered two policing divisions. He claimed that police on each side tried to nudge the body over to the other side so that they wouldn’t have to deal with it.

I am not sure if there is any truth in that but it was a long time ago and reflects the sort of black humour I have heard from police and others in emergency services.

I worked with the RUC part-time at their training camps at Garnerville, Gough Barracks and Maydown in the late Nineties and learnt that they tended to think of themselves as a third community in Northern Ireland.

As a rough estimate, during the time that Drew Harris served in the RUC, 125 officers were murdered.

Colm Horkan is the first Garda officer to have been murdered during his spell as commissioner there. It was a moving funeral, inhibited by social distancing. Colm’s brother spoke of him touchingly as the rock in the family and a GAA player who had given some people in the congregation a hard time on the field.

With good fortune and care, Commissioner Harris may see out his term at the head of An Garda Siochana without another funeral for a murdered officer. Bloody as the gang scene is in the south, it is not nearly as bloody as the north was in the 1980s.

It would have been a lot less bloody if more had had the grace Harris showed on Sunday.