Police Cooperation across the Irish Border: Familiarity Breeding Contempt for Transparency and Accountability

Abstract

This article critically examines the practice, methods, and regulation of cross‐border police cooperation between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Despite legal and political divisions, police cooperation has survived and flourished in recent years especially among police officers on the ground. By comparison, the development of transparent regulatory and accountability structures and processes has been disappointing. While there have been domestic initiatives at the intergovernmental and legislative levels, these have tended to emphasize the centrality of direct engagement between the police chiefs and senior civil servants at the expense of formal transparent procedures. EU instruments have been marginalized as the police forces and their administrations prefer informal networks and force‐to‐force agreements which, it is argued, shield cross‐border police cooperation from standards of transparency, oversight, and accountability which are essential to its legitimacy. They also highlight the limitations of the current EU legislative approach to cross‐border police cooperation.