Jesuit priest Father Peter McVerry has criticised proposed reforms to make the Garda more accountable as "largely cosmetic". Patsy McGarry, Religious Affairs Correspondent, reports.
The priest, who has worked with homeless young people in Dublin for 25 years, said that "while the Minister (for Justice, Mr McDowell) states that the independent inspectorate will have all the powers of the Police Ombudsman in Northern Ireland, what he has announced to date shows that it will fall very far short of that target".
The inspectorate would be "a seriously watered down version of the Northern Ireland Police Ombudsman's office".
Its independence was already perceived as compromised, he said. "The three-person inspectorate will be a political appointmentand that one of the other appointments is likely to be a former senior garda," he noted in the current edition of of the Jesuit journal Working Notes.
He said as political appointees the inspectorate would be "chosen carefully", and the fact that it would not be as well resourced as its Northern counterpart could mean that it would not "be able to undertake an investigation into all complaints".
His view was "this attempt at reform is primarily about control of costs rather than a serious attempt to make the Garda accountable".
He added that "the Garda inspectorate may be more about saving money on tribunals that reforming the structures of the Garda".
He was also seriously worried by "the fact that none of the Garda representative associations have come out fighting against these proposed reforms, something they have never been slow to do in the past when they feel that their power or autonomy has been criticised".