Senator Maurice Hayes has warned against the emergence of a two-tier policing system.
He said there was a real danger for society that the wealthy would withdraw into gated estates, shop in secure shopping centres and travel between them in secure cars, leaving a wasteland outside this world.
He was speaking at a Dublin Labour Party conference on Saturday on A Safe and Secure Dublin on the relevance of the Patten Report for policing in the Republic. He said there were lessons in the report for everywhere.
He stressed the report was about policing, not about the police. He also pointed out that a lot of policing functions had already been privatised, with private security firms policing shopping centres and providing security for certain types of housing estates.
Everyone was entitled to an equal quality of policing, he said. Patten had stressed the importance of community policing. "It is important that the police is representing all the community, in all its diversity," he said.
In the North this was translated into representing working-class Protestants and Catholics who might support paramilitaries. In the Republic it also had application in the need to represent working class and immigrant communities.
"I was in the north inner city recently and the community there was saying how wonderful it was that there was now one garda from Sheriff Street," he told The Irish Times.
Asked to expand on the objections he raised in the Senate to the manner in which the Garda Ombudsman Commission was appointed, he said: "We are very lucky to have the people we have on it. But in this day and age I would have thought it would have been better it if was advertised. Everyone could have had confidence in the process then. But the people on it are excellent."