Back down, commissioner, before you do more damage
GARDA COMMISSIONER Drew Harris needs to pull back, and fairly lively. If he doesn’t our Three Amigos in Government, irrespective of what poor Helen McEntee might think, will do the pulling back for him. It’s absolutely clear that the relationship between Mr Harris and his 14,000 rank-and-file gardaí is as Baltic, not to say as bitter, as that between good old King Henry VIII and his many wives. Henry’s carry-on delivered up two heads on the executioner’s block; this escalating Garda revolt is likely to produce one, unless everybody takes a breather. And we all know whose head that’ll be.
The GRA pressed the nuclear button with their ‘no-way-back’ vote of no confidence in Harris. They knew full well what the result of that vote would be and must have considered the consequences of what is a humiliating rebuke for the commissioner, one he himself describes as a kick in the teeth.
The GRA leadership know they have inflicted, in a premeditated and wilful manner, appalling damage to the commissioner’s credibility as chief of police. And this week they followed up with their coup de grace strategy involving a workto-rule ban on overtime and, alarmingly, a decision to simply refuse to work the old Westmanstown Roster if it is reintroduced on November 6 as planned.
THEN if that doesn’t smarten up Harris, they’ll strike on November 10 by withdrawing their labour. Very James Connolly and not at all like something you’d expect from what’s supposed to be a disciplined command-and-control organisation. This is a stark illustration of the alienation and frustration now being felt by regular gardaí. It’s also represents a massive failure on the part of Minister McEntee, her mandarins and advisers at the Department of Justice, for not anticipating this extraordinary Garda rebellion and decommissioning it before it caused any real damage.
Well now it has. It represents a dangerous precedent which, if Harris is forced to resign or gets the chop, completely undermines and perhaps even usurps Government discretion on who should be Garda commissioner. Are we now to have a situation where rank-and-file gardaí can dictate how long their boss stays in office? Surely not.
There’s little surprise, therefore, about the heightening urgency in Government to sort this mess out before there’s a disastrous meltdown. In the Dáil on Thursday, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar almost pleaded with the GRA to allow their row with Harris go the Workplace Relations Commission.
Minister McEntee has also called for the gardaí to ‘negotiate’, which means, in effect, that Harris will almost certainly have to abandon entirely the hated four-days-on, four-days-off Westmanstown Roster.
Within hours of McEntee’s call for negotiation, the commissioner said he was willing to compromise, despite refusing so far to take the threat of a return to the old roster off the table to facilitate talks. This is certainly not the way to make friends and influence people.
In a week when we should be showering the gardaí and their management with thanks and praise arising from the capture of a record €157m worth of cocaine after the dramatic seizure of a ship on the high seas, we’re forced to confront the very real prospect of a Garda strike on November 10. Thugs and bandits will be given the run of the place as gardaí abandon that thin blue line at a time when the force is already facing a staffing and retention crisis.
Commissioner Harris and this top officers have managed to unite all the historically quarrelling elements within the GRA, providing the association with an ‘enemy’ they can all agree on.
Harris’s perceived stubbornness has also ensured that a united GRA has almost universal support across the political spectrum (lovely to see Sinn Féin rowing in behind our police service at least), backed up by the general public. Fair play to you, Drew.
THE GRA may argue that this is not personal against the commissioner. Reasonable people would dismiss such an assertion as risible. Of course it’s personal – the GRA leadership and almost every single member of the rank-and-file gardaí targeted Harris in a manner never done before to a commissioner. This was as exceptional as it was incendiary. And the genie is now well and truly out of the bottle. At this point only a humiliating withdrawal by the commissioner of his intention to force the Westmanstown Roster on his defiant, and potentially mutinous, force will defuse this confrontation.
Commissioner Harris needs to get himself off the hook. In doing so he’d get the GRA off the hook as well. Because if this Garda strike proceeds the public support they enjoy cannot be guaranteed to continue as crime figures spike, as robberies escalate and people no longer feel safe on the streets, or even in their own homes.