‘Marking the Card’ of an Overseas Candidate for Garda Commissioner

Abstract

‘Marking the Card’ of an Overseas Candidate for Garda Commissioner William Kingston You could hardly have thought of applying for this job without being aware that the Force you are offering to command has had an extremely troubled history, but you are unlikely to know the root cause of it. This is that – unlike the Irish Army, and very likely any police force in which you have served – it has never had a separately recruited and trained officer corps. You will not need to be reminded of how the nature of the work of armies and police forces inevitably means that their members develop exceptionally strong cohesive bonds. When lives can depend upon comrades, of course there will be readiness to ‘circle the wagons’to defend them against outsiders, however much in the wrong they may be. Relationships, comradeship, solidarity, esprit de corps, collegiality, hold an organisation together but like everything else, they can become corrupted. The traditional way of avoiding the corruption of unaccountable power in such organisations has been through an officer corps which is insulated from the cohesion of the majority, so that there is a clear distinction between those whose job it is to command and those who have to obey. This was the case with policing in Ireland before independence, and the Irish army has always had it, with a Cadet School in place since 1926. Regrettably, the attempt to give the Garda the same by its second commissioner was stillborn because of resistance from the rank-and-file. In contrast to the army’s officers, therefore, who are a distinct group from the ranks, and are recruited to be so, the Garda’s senior officers all come up from the bottom. When individuals begin on a basis of equality in training, it is not easy for those later promoted into authority over others to impose that authority, and subordinates can readily flout it. Garda indiscipline There is now overwhelming evidence of the extent to which the higher levels oftheForceareunable–andindeedreluctant–toenforcenecessarydiscipline. Studies • volume 107 • number 426 211 You will no doubt have learned already about wholesale falsification of breath tests, wrongful convictions and also financial irregularities in the Garda Training College at Templemore. Essential pre-interview reading for you on this point is the report by Justice Morris on the utter failure of senior officers to deal with shocking behaviour by Donegal gardaí. (www.morristribunal.ie). Internal inquiries had failed to deal with this because those who were being investigated were on first-name terms with their investigators, since they had all been through Templemore together. The Justice described ‘a staggering level of indiscipline and insubordination in the force’, and how rank and file gardaí ‘had no compunction about showing contempt for their officers’. He also noted that ‘the culture of indiscipline was not confined to Donegal’. We now know that this does not only mean geography: in respect of the breath test scandal, many senior officers simply ignored their commissioner’s requirement for them to report the figures for their districts. None of this would ever have been tolerated by a separately recruited and trained officer corps. It has to be accepted that external efforts at Garda reform such as the Ombudsman Commission and the Policing Authority are nothing more than attempts to deal with symptoms. The disease is a lack of crucial distinction between those who set standards and those who have to work according to them in Irish policing since independence. It is open to you to apply to command the Force because the Commission on the Future of Policing has told the government bluntly that the Garda simply does not have the personnel to bring about its own reform. Whistleblowing and civilianisation as practical policies If a separate officer corps could not be imposed on the Garda in 1925, it certainly cannot be introduced now. All you could do, therefore, is try to improve the performance of those already in post, and the most effective way of doing this is to have them grasp the danger to themselves from covering up wrongdoing. The most effective instrument for this is whistleblowing, since the cover-up is the cancer of organisational cohesion...