Gardaí refuse to say if taxpayer paying rent for new Commissioner
Harris lives in Phoenix Park HQ despite pay of €250,000
TIGHT-LIPPED Justice chiefs have refused to say if the State accommodation enjoyed by Garda Commissioner Drew Harris is provided on a rent-free basis.
The commissioner lives at Garda Headquarters in the Phoenix Park.
But this week both An Garda Síochána and the Department of Justice refused to answer whether he pays rent.
Commissioner Harris, 53, is on a €250,000 salary and has use of two armour-plated BMW jeeps, worth at least €600,000. It has also emerged that considerable resources have been allocated to provide the father of four with round-the-clock armed security at his Dublin living quarters.
The Commissioner’s wife and dog have moved to the capital. His four children are adults, and do not live with their parents.
But when asked this weekend about whether Commissioner Harris was paying any rent, a spokesman at the Garda Press Office would only say: ‘The Department of Justice are the Commissioner’s employers.’
Pressed further about the special arrangements that have been put in place for the Commissioner, the spokesman added: ‘For security reasons an Garda Síochána does not comment on the detail of the security arrangements for the Commissioner.’
A spokesman for the Department of Justice ignored the question.
Commissioner Harris is the first policeman from outside the State to be appointed Garda Commissioner. Up until his appointment last year he was a serving member of Northern Ireland’s police force, the PSNI.
The Commissioner is deemed to be under threat from dissident republican and loyalist paramilitaries. His father Alwyn was killed in an IRA car bomb.
Mr Harris Sr was killed on his way to a church service in 1989 while he was a serving member of the then-Northern Ireland police force, the RUC.
Speaking about this threat, he told The Sunday Times last September: ‘The reality of my policing career is that I’ve been under threat from both republican and loyalist groups. What am I to do? Am I to say, “OK, well, I’m going to throw the towel in and retreat from public life and it will simmer down”?
‘I’ve chosen not to do that. I’ve chosen to serve and do my public duty in both Northern Ireland and here.’
He was speaking shortly after he was sworn in as Commissioner last September.
His appointment caused considerable controversy, with some former senior gardaí and army
He has round-the-clock security at quarters ‘I’ve chosen to serve and do my public duty’
officers questioning how, given Mr Harris’s previous allegiance to an external police force, he would deal with highly classified material and, in particular, sensitive information about dissident republicans.
Furthermore, at the Smithwick Tribunal – which investigated the killing of senior RUC officers, Harry Breen and Robert Buchanan, after they crossed from the Republic into Northern Ireland after meeting with gardaí in 1989 – Mr Harris claimed there had been collusion between some gardaí and the IRA.
Meanwhile, the bulletproof BMW X5 jeeps in which he travels were bought around the time of Mr Harris’s appointzment last year.
And since then, two high- spec Audi A6 cars used by Commissioner Harris’s predecessors Nóirín O’Sullivan and Martin Callinan, have lain idle at Headquarters.