Even if Harris hands in his ‘badge and gun’ we’ll still need a political response
I’VE either spent too much time in Dáil committee rooms or watched too many US TV police procedurals. Last Wednesday as I watched Garda Commissioner Drew Harris in Committee Room 4 explaining the series of catastrophic policing failures, my imagination drifted. I pictured Drew Harris as rookie detective coming into a Bronx police precinct and presenting a tough, foulmouthed police captain with the narrative he unwound at the Justice Committee last Wednesday.
Would he have been ordered to place his gun and badge on the captain’s desk? Definitely. Would he have been flung against the wall and told: ‘God damn you Harris, you’re a good cop, but you’ve got to clean up your f***ing act or you’ll be busted down to uniform, permanent.’ Probably.
At one point there appeared there might be some candour from our top lawman, particularly when he departed from the previous loyal but deluded line that he and his predecessors have used about Garda numbers – that the force is ‘sufficiently resourced’.
In response to a question from Fine Gael TD Alan Farrell about whether there were enough gardaí in the northeast inner city, where the riot shared around the world occurred last Thursday week, he responded about general numbers.
‘The organisation is short of personnel,’ he said. ‘We’re short of 1,000 as we sit. By definition, if we’re growing, it’s because we’re too small at this period in time.’ This was indeed a departure from the Government line.
THERE was another departure when he conceded that rankand-file gardaí appear to be wary of using excessive force against assailants because they fear an investigation by the Garda Síochána Ombudsman Commission (GSOC). He said he could ‘easily see’ why there’s a ‘chill factor’ associated with investigations of gardaí who have used force and had a complaint made about it.
This was another extraordinary, on-the-record admission of claims that were made by Cabinet and senior Garda sources in this newspaper last weekend – that gardaí are afraid to draw their batons for fear of penal investigation.
Yet much of the rest was the very definition of closing the stable door after the horse has bolted. New public order management, new tasers, a whole new approach. We’ll clean up after the flood.
However, around 2pm on Thursday Drew Harris made statements that would have caused our fictitious precinct chief to rip his own hair out of his scalp.
The only time our commissioner, a former PSNI chief, appeared nervous was when he was being questioned by the Sinn Féin Justice spokesman Pa Daly.
Daly’s questioning was astute: could the events of November 23 not have been foreseen? Harris said this precise incident (the riot) could not have been foreseen. He said there was a ‘huge effort’ by rioters to impose anarchy.
The commissioner, eyeing Daly through eyes that are no longer behind glasses, said, ‘We had a riot, and a riot is in effect an uncontrollable event which is brought to a place of peace.’
This is the heart of the disingenuous response from the Garda Commissioner and Justice Minister Helen McEntee to the fact that our law enforcement ceded control of our capital city to a few hundred rioters on November 23. For hours, they were free to burn public transport infrastructure, loot shops in one of our main shopping districts and, most heinously, physically assault our gardaí. And the whole world looked on.
McEntee and Harris say this riot could not have been foreseen. Let’s look at just a few incidents in our jurisdiction this year.
This newspaper’s crime correspondent, Debbie McCann, reported last May that senior Gardaí felt they had neither the powers nor the political support to take back control of a barricaded road in Co. Clare. There were chilling cases of far-right activists and locals blocking roads, filming and questioning refugees and boarding buses on which these already traumatised people were being transported.
A Garda source told the awardwinning journalist: ‘There are issues around these groupings becoming militant and gardaí are trying to risk-assess their capabilities. Gardaí have seen these groups going into a new sphere of anti-immigration and targeting immigrants’.
As gardaí stood in the line of fire last May, officers warned existing ‘legislation is letting us down’, adding it is ‘only a matter of time’ before extremists kill someone if the threat is not dealt with quickly. Exhibit One: Gardaí lost control of public highways and found Garda leadership absent.
THAT week, acting Justice Minister Simon Harris would not respond to our queries, and senior sources said that this was a Garda operational matter. Two months later, about 200 yards from where last week’s riots were sparked, on Talbot Street, an innocent American tourist was assaulted and suffered ‘life-changing injuries’. The man is recovering but the reputation of An Garda Síochána for keeping order in the north inner city has not recovered.
Ms McEntee also suffered irreparable image damage when she was photographed visiting the area – just metres from Store Street Garda Station – flanked by senior gardaí. Images of the Justice Minister venturing onto the ‘mean streets’, which are actually a major tourist destination, but only with police protection, were beamed around the world. Exhibit Two: The State failed to protect US citizens from being beaten senseless, metres from a garda station.
Exactly two months later I stood outside Leinster House watching women and children being harassed by far-right protesters. Again international coverage was given to a TD, Michael Healy-Rae, being jostled and abused by unbridled protesters. Bottles of urine were thrown at politicians. I witnessed otherwise brave gardaí fearful of drawing their batons. The public order unit were not released though they were on stand-by within metres of the front gate. At one stage I spoke to a garda I knew. I pointed at a gallows effigy of politicians and he refused to act. Exhibit Three: Gardaí lost control of Kildare Street on the opening day of the Dáil, September 20, 2023.
A week later another awardwinning journalist, Craig Hughes of our sister paper the Irish Daily Mail, spoke to a shirt-sleeved Commissioner Harris outside Leinster House as he marshalled a massively beefed-up security operation, foreshadowing his now familiar ‘horse has bolted’ strategy.
A lot of this has been lost in the reaction to the anarchy of November 23. Yet the facts are blatant: Several times in the past six months, an under-resourced and incompetently led Garda force has lost control of our rural boreens and city thoroughfares.
Yes, there was organisation and extreme circumstances during the north inner city riots. But I have lived and worked in that area and I went to school there. I have never seen it so anarchic on a day-to-day basis. What the rioters figured out, after a little encouragement from the precedents in Clare, the north inner city itself and the Dublin 2 Government district, is that there aren’t enough gardaí to control them if they band together. And even if there were enough, they are too fearful of GSOC investigations and internal discipline.
These scenes of anarchy are due to inadequate policing, and of course Drew Harris should hand over the figurative ‘badge and gun’. But then what? There must be political consequence too. And if this coalition intends to fight the Sinn Féin surge with a counternarrative based on choosing stability over risk, or experience in government over populism, then riots on the streets of the capital aren’t exactly the election poster imagery they should be choosing.
The political response has been to insist there’s ‘nothing to see here’, while spectacular explosions and acts of wanton violence happen in the background, like Leslie Nielsen’s Lt Frank Drebbin in the film Police Squad. The problem is Nielsen was in on the joke. Helen McEntee doesn’t seem to be aware that she is becoming one.