The Minister for Justice, Mr McDowell, has said he hopes that individual gardaí will see the Garda Bill as an opportunity to overcome "credibility issues" now faced by the force.
Introducing a Bill, which he said would provide the most comprehensive and radical modernisation of policing law, Mr McDowell said no piece of legislation would create confidence in the force "just by the wave of a magic wand".
The Bill sets out, for the first time, procedures under which investigations of complaints against individual gardaí can be carried out by the new Ombudsman Commission, independent of the force.
While the new legislation also provides for the creation of a Garda reserve, Mr McDowell said the Government had not taken any decision on creating such a force.
Mr McDowell said the Garda Síochána maintained the confidence of the great majority of people but he noted recent opinion-poll findings in The Irish Times which found that the force had "credibility issues" among young people in particular.
Noting that the Garda was both the national policing and security service for the State, he said it was for the Government to have responsibility for the force and not an independent police authority.
A new power on the part of the Minister for Justice to issue a policing direction would be exercised in public, he said.
If security demanded that the detail of such a direction be kept secret, he said there would be an obligation to inform the Oireachtas that a direction had been made.
Mr McDowell said his criminal sanctions against gardaí who gave information to the media without authorisation were neither unreasonable nor draconian. The same standards applied for the staff of the Central Bank, the Revenue and to authorised officers working on investigations under the Companies Acts.
"It will be for the Commissioner of the day to decide who does and does not talk to media about investigations," he said.
"Most people out there would much prefer to have these protections there to prevent the harmful release of information about them to the public at large."
