Garda Commissioner Drew Harris has said it was “outrageous” that the coffin of garda killer and IRA member Pearse McAuley was draped in the Tricolour at his funeral last week.
Mr Harris’s comments follow similar criticism from new Fine Gael leader and taoiseach-in-waiting, Simon Harris, who said it was shameful to see the flag “spread over the coffin of a garda killer”.
The Association of Garda Sergeants and Inspectors (AGSI) also condemned the scenes at McAuley’s funeral in Strabane, Co Tyrone.
AGSI president Paul Curran described as “outrageous” the draping of the Tricolour on the coffin of a man who had shot dead Det Jerry McCabe in Adare, Co Limerick, during a 1996 IRA bank robbery. He told delegates at AGSI’s annual conference in Westport, Co Mayo that this kind of use of the flag “completely undermines the Garda organisation and our work protecting the citizens of this State”.
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Mr Curran noted that Det McCabe’s son was in the room, as a member of the force and an AGSI delegate. He said Sgt John McCabe was carrying on “the great work of his father in Limerick”.
Sinn Féin TD Pearse Doherty earlier said McAuley had nothing to do with Sinn Féin for “many, many, many years” and that “in the eyes of republicans, he’s not a republican”.
“In relation to the funeral of Pearse McAuley we had no hand, act or part in it,” he said. “In relation to the placement of a tricolour, if it was our decision, one would not be on the coffin.”
Speaking on some of the issues raised at the conference, Mr Harris said he did not disagree with AGSI’s suggestion that a force of 18,000 gardaí was required to keep pace with population growth and policing demands.
AGSI believes the Government’s plan to increase the size of the force from 14,000 at present to 15,000 is too conservative.
Mr Harris said he believed there was broad agreement that the Garda had to grow significantly. However, he noted recruitment was being hampered by the fact that classes entering the Garda College were now smaller, having regularly been 200-strong before the pandemic. He said more candidates were being offered places but were not taking them up.
“We’re going to have to look at precisely why we’re not getting the recruitment that we were in 2018, 2019 and the early part of 2020. I recognise that as being a significant problem,” he said.
Mr Harris believed the dropout rate was “in part down to opportunities” in other areas of the jobs market, but also due to the “terms and conditions” being offered by the Garda.
The organisation needed to “significantly lift our recruitment” to grow over the next decade, he said, but how that will be achieved was yet to be determined.
Speaking to reporters in Westport, Mr Harris and Minister for Justice Helen McEntee said they believed authorities in the United Arab Emirates were fully committed to helping their Irish colleagues in the investigation into, and extradition of, the Dubai-based leaders of the Kinahan cartel. However, they said, legal criteria had to be satisfied, and this was taking time.
Ms McEntee announced that the use of facial recognition technology (FRT) in investigating crimes was being expanded to include attacks against Garda members.
She said attacks against gardaí, and the intimidation that members of the force increasingly endure while on duty, were now so serious that she was including those crimes on the schedule of offences that can be investigated using the technology.
The inclusion of the offence of assaulting a Garda or Defence Forces member in the Facial Recognition Technology Bill means the technology can be used in investigating those crimes as well as child sexual abuse, child kidnapping or abduction, drug crime and human trafficking.
“The time for facial recognition technology has come,” Ms McEntee told delegates at the AGSI conference. “We need to declare over the days of gardaí trawling through hours of footage, using up time and resources, delaying arrests and prosecutions.”
Regarding the extended use of the technology, Olga Cronin of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties expressed concern over what she described as “mission creep”, but said of greater concern was its “fundamentally flawed” nature.
UCD law professor TJ McIntyre said a widening of the scope of FRT legislation would do nothing to address concerns about the technology and how it “tends to discriminate against certain groups and tends to produce a lot of false positive results”.
Simon McGarr of Digital Rights Ireland noted that an “immediate push to increase the number of offences for which facial recognition technology would be used is precisely what has been warned against”.
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