A garda conference in Cork has heard a call for the Minister for Justice to review the Garda Complaints Board, which oversees complaints by members of the public about actions of gardai.
The Association of Garda Sergeants and Inspectors (AGSI) accused the Garda Complaints Board of making an "unwarranted slur" on members of the force by saying that "only one" officer was found guilty of a serious breach of discipline in 1997.
The AGSI president, Mr Pat Diggin, said this statement inferred there were "more guilty people out there who have not been discovered or nailed by the complaints procedures".
Mr Diggin also denounced a call by the board to be allocated a panel of senior gardai to investigate serious complaints.
"The implication behind the board's call is that our members are not objective, are not fair-minded enough to carry out these inquiries properly. There is an implication that there is a global conspiracy among the gardai to pervert the course of justice, which will continue unchecked until the board has full supervision. I reject that implication. It is an insult to our profession."
In 1997, the Complaints Board dealt with 1,680 complaints. Of these 567 were deemed inadmissible under the terms of the board's procedures. Another 52 were resolved or dealt with as minor breaches of discipline and eight were referred to a tribunal as serious breaches of discipline. The rest of the complaints were carried on and results of these complaints are not yet available.
The number of complaints against gardai increased by about 7 per cent each year.
Both AGSI and the other Garda union, the Garda Representative Association, have brought High Court cases against the board in relation to its investigations in recent years.
In his speech to the annual AGSI conference in Cork last night, Mr Diggin said: "Why have we no analysis of the reasons why complaints increase each year? Why have we no breakdown of the type of complainant?
"How many people who lodge complaints, for instance, are already before the courts for some offence or may have received a warning of a possible prosecution?
"We have been calling for many years for the board to initiate prosecutions of people who make false and malicious complaints and while we read that it is the board's policy to do so, we have been unable to find any detail of the numbers of such cases which have been referred down the years."
In his address Mr Diggin also said that the increase in specialist units in the Garda - from drugs to fraud - had led to a decline in the number of supervisor officers for mainstream policing.
He also said the annual allocation of £5 million for building Garda stations was insufficient and there were still "damp, cold, overcrowding and poor facilities" in many stations.