Calls for gardaí to face Dáil grilling over civil servant
THERE have been calls for senior gardaí to be brought before the Justice Committee to explain why attempts were made to quash a summons against a senior civil servant at the Department of the Taoiseach.
Sinn Féin justice spokesman Donnchadh Ó Laoghaire said the case was extremely serious and that it should be raised with senior gardaí when the Oireachtas justice committee reconvenes in January.
‘If a senior garda interfered with the prosecution of a member of staff at the Department of the Taoiseach, then it is clearly wrong and totally inappropriate,’ he said.
Mr Ó Laoghaire said he was aware the criminal case may yet come before the courts, but it was imperative gardaí explain if a summons was quashed for political reasons.
Mr Ó Laoghaire said the 2014 Toland report had found an excessively close relationship between gardaí and civil servants, and that the culture of secrecy had to change.
Yesterday our sister paper, the Irish Mail on Sunday exclusively revealed the claims made by a Garda whistleblower in a protected disclosure.
In it, it is alleged that a senior garda intervened in an attempt to prevent any prosecution against the civil servant at Leo Varadkar’s department. Other allegations made in the document include abuses of power, attempts to pervert the course of justice, coercion of the gardaí and improper payment.
The controversy centres around a civil servant who was arrested as a result of a drunken incident on a night out, during which it is alleged she was abusive to gardaí.
The woman had been at the Department of the Taoiseach for several years prior to Mr Varadkar’s appointment, and the incident occurred just two days after he took office.
A spokesperson for Mr Varadkar has said that there is ‘no way he can be implicated in any way’.
THE allegations in the Irish Mail on Sunday yesterday that senior gardaí took it upon themselves to protect an official in the Department of the Taoiseach from public humiliation neatly illustrate the deep-seated cultural malaise within the Garda Síochána.
It shows that, for all the crises of recent years – the reports of individual gardaí compromising the integrity of the police force by bending the rules, cancelling penalty points or grossly exaggerating the numbers of breath tests, that there still persists within the organisation, a readiness to enforce the law, or not, as may be the case in this instance – on the basis of a nod and a wink.
This latest incident of alleged garda malpractice blew up over a comparatively trivial affair involving a drunken public servant from the Department of the Taoiseach who got into a row with a taxi driver last June.
Yet the elaborate steps taken by a senior garda to cover it up and save the civil servant from prosecution has culminated in a whistleblower making a protected disclosure, alleging abuse of power, seeking to pervert the course of justice, coercion of the gardaí and improper payment.
It all sounds horribly familiar to the pattern of garda behaviour that has heaped discredit on the force, helped sink the Department of Justice into a quagmire of allegations of excessive secrecy and subservience, so deep that the Taoiseach took the unprecedented step of condemning it as ‘dysfunctional’ in the aftermath of Frances Fitzgerald’s resignation.
The episode also highlights our continued reliance on the integrity of whistleblowers for information about the inner workings of the Garda Síochána.
It unfolded when a female civil servant was arrested in Dublin in the early hours of June 24 this year. She was travelling home in a taxi when the driver accused her of soiling his car, in a manner that we can only hazard a guess.
In any event, a row broke out between both parties, whereupon the taximan drove to the nearest Garda station.
According to the whistleblower’s allegations, the passenger was ‘highly intoxicated’, had soiled the taxi and the two gardaí on duty asked her to pay the fee, which along with the fare, came to a hefty €160.
As is sadly all too common in these latenight altercations, when the messy aspects of inebriation collide with the stern hand of officialdom, the mood disintegrated, turning ugly.
Things were said by the public servant that in the cold light of morning sobriety she must have regretted.
The whistleblower alleges that she ‘was highly abusive to the gardaí and refused to pay the soilage fee, or indeed the taxi fare’.
Gardaí dealing with the incident made all reasonable attempts to bring the matter to a satisfactory and amenable conclusion.
They said they were unaware of the woman’s employment status during the course of the incident.
The disclosure by the whistleblower alleges the woman referred to both gardaí as ‘s*** on her shoe’.
According to the Irish Mail On Sunday, three charges relating to the unfortunate incident have been issued, and are listed for hearing at a court date next year.
They include: refusing to pay the fare or fee for the hire of the taxi; intoxication in a public place; and threatening and abusive behaviour. It is not however clear if the civil servant has received the summons.
The whistleblower’s account also reveals the deliberate steps taken by senior gardaí to prevent the summons ever seeing the light of day.
Pressure
It appears that a higher ranking officer phoned the arresting garda, saying that the charges against the public servant should be dropped, suggesting that she be given an ‘adult caution’, which is a warning that avoids a criminal record.
The arresting garda gave a variety of reasons for why the order, which apparently originated from a garda even further up the chain of command, could not be followed: that a summons had already been initiated, and an adult caution was not legally applicable in the case.
He stuck to his guns and ignored the direction to suppress the summons. But that was not the end of it. There was a follow-up conversation during which it is claimed the senior garda became ‘irate’, telling the arresting officer that he should not have issued summonses against a person he grandly described as working with ‘An Taoiseach Leo Varadkar’. Crucially, the Taoiseach had no knowledge of his name being employed to heap pressure on the lowlier officer, or of the further pains the senior garda took to save his department from embarrassment.
According to the whistleblower, the senior garda took the law into his own hands. He met the taxi driver, gave him a sum of money, saying that the matter had been brought to a conclusion without the need for court proceedings.
The Department of the Taoiseach says that the day after her drunken disgrace, their official was contacted by the gardaí who advised she would receive an adult caution. A spokesperson also said that she agreed to pay the €160, giving it to the garda, who arranged to pass it to the taximan.
The preferential treatment shown to a State employee as recently as six months ago shows that, despite the tidal wave of resignations and careers lost or abruptly terminated caused by the whistleblower controversy – the toppling of two justice ministers, two Garda commissioners, and a number of top mandarins at the Department of Justice – the ripples of reform have yet to trickle through the Garda ranks.
So it seems it’s business as usual in Garda stations up and down the country for as long as either political motives or career advancement, or even the sincere but misguided belief that protecting the top echelons of Government, is part of the job description.
All of this tends to result in individual gardaí sometimes behaving in a way that might jeopardise public trust in their organisation or potentially plunge it into yet another scandal.
Much is made about recruiting an international figure or even a non-police officer as the next Garda commissioner in a bid to avoid repeating past mistakes.
The Policing Authority is about to start the arduous process of recruiting a new commissioner, and public expectations are high about his or her ability to confront vested interests and introduce a cultural sea-change throughout the organisation.
But this latest incident shows that creating a modern police force with high ethical standards is not just a matter of changing the top brass.
It’s also a matter of root-and-branch reform, of unravelling the entire fabric of the Garda, of introducing fresh faces right throughout the hierarchy so that, at every level, there are officers uncontaminated by the old, entrenched and discredited ways of doing business.
As much as we need a Garda commissioner who has not been indoctrinated in the force’s hidden curriculum, we also need Garda officers whose eyes are open to its huge flaws.