Minister for Justice Michael McDowell made a seriously alarming statement earlier this week. He said that last December both the Garda Representative Association (GRA) and the Association of Garda Sergeants and Inspectors (AGSI) had threatened to refuse to co-operate with the new Garda Ombudsman Commission, writes Mary Raftery.
Non-co-operation with robust internal investigation procedures would certainly represent a most fundamental breach of duty by rank-and-file gardaí. The importance of an independent complaints mechanism has become even more critical in the wake of the extensive evidence of garda misconduct emerging from the Morris tribunal in Donegal.
It was, however, the first we had heard of such a threat of non-co-operation. Both Garda organisations certainly had reservations about the ombudsman commission and had made alternative proposals. Included among these was that gardaí would have no role whatsoever in investigating complaints, and that this function should be undertaken by an entirely separate and independent body. This was rejected by Government and there the matter lay.
Until last Monday, that is, and the Minister for Justice's speech at the AGSI annual conference in Killarney. He was extremely disappointed, he said, by the threat made by both the AGSI and the GRA. It was designed to make the ombudsman commission inoperable, would amount to unlawful subversion and was not acceptable, he argued.
All very true, if it were accurate. But there is only one problem. Both the GRA and the AGSI are adamant that they made no such threat at any stage. They say that they have never had the slightest intention of refusing to co-operate with the ombudsman commission.
"This is an appalling piece of misinformation by the Minister," an AGSI spokesperson told me yesterday. "There's a lot of anger about it down here at our conference. Our president stood up after the Minister's speech and flatly denied it."
So perhaps it was the GRA then who had conveyed this impression to Michael McDowell. "That's completely false," a GRA spokesperson told me. "We're co-operating 100 per cent with the commission and never said otherwise. The Minister is just trying to muddy the waters."
This kind of wide divergence between parties present at meetings with the Minister for Justice has happened before. The most public case was that of the masters of the Dublin maternity hospitals, when they met Michael McDowell in 2003. He claimed that they had pleaded with him to hold a referendum on citizenship for babies born in Ireland to non-Irish parents. They categorically denied this.
Non-co-operation has certainly been the buzz word of the AGSI conference, but only in relation to the Minister's proposal to form a Garda reserve force. Both the AGSI and the GRA believe that Michael McDowell is attempting to blacken their name by throwing other issues into the non- co-operation pot, unfairly presenting them as intransigent, unreasonable and even willing to subvert the democratic process.
The issue of the reserve has been extraordinarily divisive. Gardaí are fighting not just with the Minister over it, but also with their own commissioner.
The Minister has said the proposal for a reserve of 4,000 members came from the commissioner, who has in turn said that it was never his idea in the first place. The Minister now says he would consider a reduction in that number to 1,400.
On training, a major issue for the Garda associations, the original proposal (contained apparently in an internal Garda management document) for 24 hours and a weekend familiarisation course was frighteningly inadequate. This has now been upped to 120 hours, although if one excludes introductory and graduation sessions, it ends up somewhere under 100 hours. This has been vigorously supported by Michael McDowell as representing best international practice.
However, the best standards here are to be found in the US. Looking across a range of police forces there, shows that reservists are trained for an average of 400 hours, and considerably more if they are allowed to carry guns.
In this respect, it is interesting to note the comments of former New York police chief John Timoney, who feels that the reserve won't work here as the Garda Síochána is understaffed, and it also needs to employ more civilians to free up gardaí to concentrate on specific police work.
Now, instead, we get this half-baked Garda Reserve proposal. So desperate is the Minister for Justice to force it through that he appears to have elevated it on to a higher plane of duty and sacrifice. Quoting from the Taoiseach's recent speech on 1916, Michael McDowell spoke of patriots, volunteers and the reserve in the same breath. There's many a propaganda purpose for which the dead and martyred generations have been used, but a Garda Reserve? Give us a break, Minister.