Why are the rank-and-file so angry at moves to establish a Garda reserve force? This week's controversy over tactics was just the tip of the iceberg, writes Kathy Sheridan.
It should have one of the high points of John Egan's personal and professional life. After several months of hard canvassing for the job of president of the Garda Representative Association (GRA), making all the right noises about everything from pepper spray to the way Michael McDowell might look at you, the prize was almost his.
Unlike, say, the presidency of the Irish Farmers' Association, the GRA campaign takes place behind closed doors. It entails months of networking, making contact with each of the 200 delegates at least once, writing to each of them at least once, gauging the temperature of mutinous rank and file and raising the rhetoric accordingly.
At meeting after meeting, the Offaly-born Egan, a chatty, well-liked teetotaller and archetypal country garda who is based in Roscrea, Co Tipperary, had been lending a sympathetic ear to a membership growing frustrated with its impotence, irked by its exclusion from a public industrial relations forum such as the Labour Court, precluded from using the ultimate employee weapon, the strike, and flailing around for an alternative by which to give someone a bloody nose.
The association, which put bullying at the centre of its campaigning issues under the outgoing presidency of Dermot O'Donnell, was feeling bullied itself. As it saw things, it had been duped by the Minister, been abandoned by the political opposition, was led by a weak and supine management, was being viewed with dismay and suspicion by the public in the wake of the Blue Flu, the shocking - and ongoing - Morris tribunal revelations relating to Co Donegal-based gardaí and the collective amnesia surrounding Garda behaviour in the May Day disturbances in 2002.
Behind closed doors, in this fervid atmosphere, the informal talk turned to hitting the politicians where it hurt: in their constituencies.
Wise counsel would have left it behind closed doors.
But in his first broad-ranging media interview with an assembly of the country's main crime reporters, John Egan declared that the association intended to target five Government TDs in marginal constituencies if plans for the Garda reserve were not abandoned.
Constituencies were named. "We will be waiting in the long grass for them," said Egan. Retired gardaí were to be encouraged to stand for election. The non-emollient response of the Minister for Justice was to say that any chance of him changing his mind on the reserve was now "gone . . . No Minister worth his salt would capitulate to that threat . . ."
Garda Commissioner Noel Conroy, visibly angry, said that if the threat went ahead, he would "not be sitting on the fence".
"What they were talking about was an attempt to affect the arithmetic in the context of a general election, to ensure that this Government would not be re-elected," says Prof Dermot Walsh, professor of law at the University of Limerick and author of Irish Police: A Legal and Constitutional Perspective. "In effect they were talking about bringing the Government down and that is most dangerous because that is the GRA going down a partisan road. If there is one principle that governs civil policing in common law countries, it is that the police must be above politics. They are there to serve the people and the Government impartially . . . That's why there was such an extreme reaction from the Minister . . ."
Heads were on the block. Within hours, private apologies were being expressed to the Minister in person over the GRA dinner at a conference from which he had been deliberately and publicly excluded as a speaker. Next morning, the GRA's general secretary, PJ Stone, announced a U-turn, saying that the GRA has made no policy decision to "become involved in politics . . . It is regrettable if that impression has been created".
A red-faced executive still clung to its stance on the reserve, in the face of two own goals. The apologies continued as the week wore on. It was a fiasco.
How it was allowed to happen remains a puzzle. There is no way the GRA could not have known what it was getting involved in, remarks Prof Walsh. Impartiality is mentioned in the Garda oath of office. Its disciplinary code specifically prohibits gardaí from participating in partisan politics.
In any event, even if the the tactic had succeeded in changing governments, it would have changed nothing else. Fine Gael was so enamoured of the concept of a reserve force that it favoured deleting the year's delay provided for in the Bill and wanted to proceed immediately.
One GRA delegate suggests that John Egan had not made the mental transition from electioneering mode to incoming president when he announced the strategy. In other words, it was a solo run, fuelled by campaign testosterone.
Or was it? On Wednesday, the outgoing president, the mild-mannered Dermot O'Donnell, was still somewhat bemused by the reaction to Egan's statement.
"Really what John Egan was saying was that the gardaí were going to exercise, as we always did, our vote in favour of candidates whose policies we wished to support. I can't go to vote in Laois-Offaly [ where the GRA believes the Minister of State at the Department of Finance, Tom Parlon, is in danger of losing his seat] but if something like this is that important to me and if I'm passionate about what is the de-professionalisation of my job, then my wife, my children, our friends, are going to want to vote the way I vote."
Privately, however, delegates - while sympathetic to Egan's personal humiliation at what should have been his big moment - were conceding that the row had wrecked a plan to get the issues before the public. For example, the impact of an address by one of the star speakers, Michael Barry, dean of industrial relations and sociology at the National College of Ireland, was virtually lost. Asserting that the reserve would be seen as "a backward step . . . an act of de-professionalisation when police forces are generally upskilling and becoming more specialised", Barry called for an independent review of the reserve, through the establishment of an independent forum, to enter into "constructive dialogue with real purpose".
But surely the representative bodies would simply use it as a forum to continue to say No? "We're not prepared to concede the principle," agrees O'Donnell. "But we want to be able to sit down and explain why we're saying what we're saying. We have no independent forum to go to. If we had access to the Labour Court, we would have been there months ago, because this affects our conditions of work."
To begin with, they feel duped and humiliated. Duped because they were told by the Minister in 2003 that the inclusion of a Garda reserve in the new Garda Act was merely "enabling legislation", and that such a reserve was not on the the agenda during his time as Minister or the lifetime of this Government. "So we thought 'we needn't worry about this one'," says O'Donnell. "We took him at his word," says Joe Dirwan, general secretary of the Association of Garda Sergeants and Inspectors (AGSI).
In other words, the executives took their eye off the ball. "Then last October," says O'Donnell, "the Minister chose a graduation ceremony in Templemore to announce that there would be a reserve." That stung, and in many ways goes to the root of their objections. Young gardaí with two years' training and celebrating their diploma day with family and friends, were being told that they were to be supplemented by volunteers; people who had just a few days' training but could swagger round neighbourhoods and football stadia in identical Garda uniforms and with full and awesome Garda powers, including the power of arrest.
Meanwhile, the Minister, with his department officials and media, travelled to Cheshire to see how a successful reserve operates. Irish Times reporter Conor Lally recalls that the first thing that struck him was the number of civilian staff manning the stations. Amid the mainly positive reports, the GRA and AGSI protestations that the Cheshire police operates with a ratio of more than one civilian support to every two officers, while their Irish counterparts have to settle for one civilian support between eight, got little airing.
"To bring us up to the Cheshire standard," says O'Donnell, "we'd need an additional 4,000 to 5,000 support staff."
"The embargo on the civil service means gardaí are taken from frontline policing to do administration work," says Dirwan. "I don't believe there's any need for a reserve at all. It's policing on the cheap, it's cosmetic. If the required frontline staff were recruited, it wouldn't be an issue." The bodies also believe that the force here should be increased from 12,439 to 16,500, to account for population growth as well as the geographical spread of the country.
"Apart from the fantastic civilian support staff in Cheshire, which the Minister has chosen as his police laboratory," says O'Donnell, "they also have stab-proof vests, retractable truncheons, pepper spray incapacitant, rigid handcuffs. And they have fabulous accommodation - that means buildings that aren't rat-infested or haven't been condemned for 10 years or have holes in the roof."
Dirwan also points out that student gardaí spend up to two years training. "We've proposed that before they get full powers, they should do 60 weeks. But the reserves need just 56 hours [ excluding introductory and graduation sessions] to attain Garda powers, immunities and privileges. There will be no requirement to pass an aptitude test or physical competency test. All they have to do is participate in a training programme; there is no requirement to pass. The disciplinary code applies only while they're on duty. Gardaí can be fined up to two weeks' wages, be admonished or get the sack for breaches of discipline - but what can you punish reserves with when they're working for nothing?"
He also raises the issue of compensation for reserve gardaí who suffer malicious injury while on duty. "With the three-year delay on compensation claims, who compensates them or their employer if they're off sick, or can't pay the mortgage?"
It has also been noted that, as of April, the Scottish national executive started to award full pay and pension rights to special constables, and that, in Canada, a review process resulted in recommendations to remunerate its special constables and to restrict their powers.
The matter of under-trained, part-time gardaí having the power to search and question neighbours for four hours a week, or delve into local information files also comes up. While the commissioner's proposals explicitly rule out access to "intelligence entries" on the Pulse system, O'Donnell interprets this as intelligence relating to reports of subversive activity, as opposed to "nosy parker stuff", such as records of a neighbour's child caught drinking in a field or low-level anti-social behaviour, information to which reserve members would have access.
The thorniest issue of all, however, relates to the power of arrest. "The power to restrain someone's liberty is a colossal power to have, coupled with the power to use as much force as necessary," says O'Donnell.
Prof Walsh describes this provision of full powers, immunities and privileges to a part-time volunteer force as "bizarre".
"A garda has massive discretionary powers. The Garda commissioner is in a position to restrict these powers in the case of the reserve . . . but the default position is full powers and he has not said that he is not going to provide those. Even if he does restrict them, he is subject to policy direction by the Minister so he could be directed to lift restrictions." So the Minister could in theory, direct the Commissioner to deploy the reserve, with full powers, in the case of another Blue Flu, "almost like an alternative police force and use it as a tool to undermine any form of garda protest".
The Minister could, in theory, also use it for party political objectives such as conducting surveillance of certain parties outside polling booths, says Walsh.
"If the real objective behind this was to provide a support to the gardaí on the beat, that could have been made explicit in the legislation and limited powers prescribed for that," says Walsh. "But it gives them full policing powers and that creates the possibility that it could be deployed in a much more extensive range of situations, as and when the Minister determines it to be convenient and that raises the suspicion of an ulterior motive."
A forthcoming book on the Garda by Prof Walsh will argue that policing structures and control mechanisms in the Republic are closer to a police state model than a civil policing model.
Nonetheless, suspicion is widespread among the public that this campaign by the Garda representative bodies is really about money - specifically overtime.
The Department of Justice has said that the reserve would "emphatically not" be a means of reducing overtime "which is an essential element in the provision of effective policing". This year's budget for overtime is €83.5m, an increase of €23m on last year. The GRA, going on CSO figures, claims that 80 per cent of the increase is explained by insufficient garda numbers for a growing population.
In 2005, the top 20 overtime earners shared some €800,000 in overtime. They included 10 sergeants, seven rank and file gardaí and three inspectors. Nonetheless, both bodies claim that they want more members to be recruited, which of itself would reduce overtime costs. O'Donnell says they find the suggestion "insulting . . . We'd love to see a zero overtime budget for the Garda Síochána".
As a reserve force seems inevitable, since it has been voted through the Dáil, why not use co-operation as a bargaining tool in pursuit of what most people would agree are legitimate claims? The words "de-professionalising" and "downgrading" recur in the reply. O'Donnell also produces records of ministerial promises dating back to 1999, promises not yet fulfilled. "There is no 'in tandem'", he says firmly, meaning there is no trust.
Where the warring parties go from here is a moot point. The Commissioner made promises this week regarding equipment and uniform. The Minister has offered to negotiate on the size of the reserve, first suggested at 4,000 members, but little else. He has made it known that reserve members will be at an advantage if they apply to join the full-time force, a detail which may produce a somewhat surprising profile of the typical reserve member. There is speculation that, in time, the reserve may become a source of free policing for the State, as potential young recruits join up to increase their chances of getting into the force after a year or two as volunteers.
As Egan licks his wounds at the end of his first week as president of the GRA, both it and the AGSI continue to plan a strategy of non-co-operation. There is talk of legal action based on health and safety requirements (being put at risk by working alongside an under-trained person), or "de-professionalisation" of a profession.
Dirwan of AGSI says they will not break the law and there will be no blue flu on its part, nor any involvement in party politics. "We regard this as an industrial relations issue."
They are due to meet the Minister for Justice next week, as the regulations to bring in the reserve are taken to the all-party Oireachtas Committee on Justice and the Garda Conciliation Council.
The Minister, who hopes to have 900 reservists in place by September, is not for turning and will take steps around obstacles or go through them. Gardaí who threaten to refuse to vet potential reserve members may find that the reason for a particular vetting application is not explicit on the form.
The bottom line, says a department source, is that the Oireachtas has enacted this. Anyone who opposes it will be subject to disciplinary action.