Situating the Present

Abstract

In his work on police accountability in Ireland, Manning (2012) describes An Garda Siochana as a ‘Hybrid’ (351): Their obligations as a national force on the one hand resemble those of the Gendarmerie of France, combining national security and domestic policing and differ somewhat from the British model (found with modifications in Australia, Canada and the United States) of locally or state-based organisations or Constabularies with some local political and economic obligations. Like the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), they are nationally funded and police both the capital and the hinterland. They have vast regulatory functions, including issuing passports. Unlike the French, English and American systems in which the Prefecture of Paris, the London Metropolitan Police and the Metropolitan Police of Washington DC, police the national capital, there is no distinctive police serving Dublin exclusively. Ireland, as of 1937, has a written constitution which associates its practices and constraints in legal terms more with the policing in the United States than with policing in common law nations.