An Garda Siochana needs to be fixed, not disbanded

Equating gardai with the police in the North in the bad old days of the Troubles is a dangerous road, writes Eilis O’Hanlon

SPEAKING on RTE radio a couple of weeks ago, Gerry Adams called for a “Patten-type approach” to Garda reform, before adding: “Now I’m not trying to draw comparisons between the old RUC and An Garda Siochana.”

So why mention the Royal Ulster Constabulary at all, unless it was to make a mental connection in listeners’ minds between the two police forces, both hated by republicans?

But then Sinn Fein would say that, wouldn’t they?

If only it was that simple. SF’s loaded language has been picked up to an alarming degree. From Fianna Fail’s Stephen Donnelly on Ivan Yates’s new radio show on Newstalk, to Labour, everyone is calling for “Patten-style” reform.

It would be convenient to blame Sinn Fein for having tricked rival politicians into adopting its language, but the truth is they’re not that clever. This is a pit into which politicians have fallen willingly, to the point where even Minister for Justice Frances Fitzgerald said last week that “we should establish an independent Patten-like commission to analyse precisely the future of An Garda Siochana”.

The terms of reference remain to be established, but the criteria for success has already been predetermined.

Everything henceforth will be judged by the question: What Would Patten Do? Are we really at that stage yet?

The guards have shown gross incompetence, and then engaged in cover-ups to hide it; calling for Garda Commissioner Noirin O’Sullivan to stand down, or be fired, is a reasonable position to hold.

But demanding that the force is no longer fit for purpose is like scrapping your car when it fails to start on a few frosty mornings, rather than letting a mechanic have a look under the bonnet first.

The RUC could not be fixed by tinkering. Many brave men and women wore that uniform, risking their lives to protect the public; more than 300 died; 8,000 were wounded.

But there were also deep institutional flaws in the force which meant that it simply could not continue in its existing form or anything like it. Those arose from the RUC’s dual role combining ordinary policing with security duties. Northern Ireland was on a war footing for decades. Emergency powers were in place. There were holding centres where torture was known to take place; a huge prison population; secret units inside the police colluded with loyalist paramilitaries in murder.

The entire force was armed. Even the police at harbours and airports had guns, long before that became the international norm. As former Hong Kong governor Chris Patten acknowledged in his report, the vast majority of RUC officers never drew their guns, and the number of discharges of weapons was extremely low, all things considered; but it wasn’t possible to dismiss State violence as the work of a few “bad apples”, especially when the force felt hostile to the nationalist community, with heavy-handed policing of protests and funerals adding to the discontent.

There may have been complaints about the Garda’s handling of Jobstown or the water charges marches, but they are not of the same order, and it’s a dangerous precedent to start conflating them. In the North, plastic baton rounds were regularly deployed; police had to travel everywhere in armoured vehicles that acted as a physical and psychological barrier between the people and the police in a way that has no parallel in the Republic.

The very symbols of the RUC were regarded as alien by many. What they saw as a foreign flag flew above police stations.

Institutionally, there was also no comparison. Prior to the establishment of the Independent Policing Au- thority, every single member of the previous authority was appointed by the British Secretary of State, and could only be removed the same way. That office holder never came from Northern Ireland, or belonged to any local party, so there was no way for people to express either support or opposition for the UK government’s decisions on policing.

There is already an independent Policing Authority in the Republic, which includes members from outside the Garda and outside the State, including a former PSNI deputy chief constable. It has a role in appointing senior staff up to Garda Commissioner level. There’s also an Ombudsman Commission and an Inspectorate. Meetings are held in public. The next one is scheduled for Thursday, April 27. Policing in the North was done in secret.

There was lots of detail in the Patten Report about resources and appointments and functions and annual policing plans and local government funding; but that was all it was — detail. At the root of the process was the need for a sacrificial lamb.

The RUC had to be put to death symbolically so that a new Northern Ireland could be born. So that’s what they did, using the Patten report as the ceremonial dagger.

It was hurtful to many good men and women in the RUC, but it had to be done, and the circumstances which meant it had to be done were very particular to Northern Ireland, and answered its needs at the time.

To invoke Patten to suggest, however well meaning the intent, that An Garda Siochana needs to be sacrificed in the same way simply serves the interests of those who want us to believe the country is so rotten and corrupt that only tearing it up and starting over again will do. That sort of thinking strengthens none but the most sinister elements of Irish politics, and care should be taken that the language used by politicians and media doesn’t hand them that victory. It is impossible to constantly equate what is happening in the guards with what happened in the RUC without tainting one with the sins of the other. An Garda Siochana, for all its failings, does not deserve that.

Call for reform. Just don’t call it Patten-style, especially when many of the fiercest critics of the guards seem to want to go even further than the author of that report. Many on the hard Left now openly fantasise about disbanding the Garda and having a purge of senior figures.

Even the RUC was not disbanded. It was renamed; human rights protections were beefed up; accountability was strengthened. If Chris Patten recognised that disbandment would have been going too far in the North, it’s deeply disquieting to misuse his name now to advocate that’s what’s needed south of the border.

‘For all its failings, An Garda Siochana is not the RUC’