The Boys in Black and Blue

Mags Glennon

Since the current Garda commissioner, Pat Byrne, took up office in 1996 thirty Gardai have been dismissed for misconduct. Internal Garda investigations of these cases are not published and they only come into the public eye if charges are laid by the DPP. Based on this alone we have seen Gardai before the courts on charges including killing a pedestrian while drunk driving, soliciting under age children for prostitution, taking bribes to drop charges, involvement in car stealing rings, giving passports to drug dealers and insurance scams. At present 70 Gardai are facing drink driving charges and no Garda has been dismissed from the force on being found guilty of drink driving. One officer, convicted in 2000 of seriously injuring a woman while three times over the limit, is now working as an armed minder for the Taoiseach.

The above are only cases where the Gardai were caught blatantly breaking the law.  The commission of offences while actually in uniform, and supposedly implementing the law, is a much greyer area. A couple of cases over the past few years hint at something very sinister within the actual practise of Garda investigations. Most of these have been reported in a cursory manner in the serious newspapers, with little real examination of the implications of the malpractice and/or corruption revealed.

Case 1:
In 1999 a self confessed Garda informant and criminal named Declan Griffin was acquitted of importing £1 million worth of heroin and ecstasy. In 1995 he had been caught red-handed with the drugs in his luggage at Dublin Airport on returning from Amsterdam. In court Griffin claimed that Detective Sgt Palmer had recruited him as an informer in 1993 and dropped charges in return for his co-operation in fingering petty criminals in the Coolock area of Dublin. In 1995 Griffin was asked to bring money to Amsterdam in relation to a drug deal and Palmer told him to go ahead. Palmer denies he knew drugs were being brought in but at the trial the jury obviously believed Griffin, dodgy though his case sounded, and freed him. After the trial a Garda spokeperson refused to say if there would be an internal inquiry into allegations of a Garda facilitating the import of drugs. We’ve heard nothing since.

Case 2:                                                                                                                One of the investigators for the Morris tribunal in Donegal is a former Garda, Michael 'Mickey' Finn. He had just retired after serving 23 years in the Gardai, during which time his name became a byword for serious Garda corruption in many areas of Dublin. Back in 1978 Finn was named repeatedly in court by Nicky Kelly as the main Garda responsible for savagely beating him until he confessed to the Sallins mail train robbery. The government refused to hold a public inquiry into the Sallins case and no action was ever taken against the 'Heavy Gang' guards responsible for the beatings, though Kelly and his co-accused were compensated by the State.  Indeed the State has always denied that such a 'Heavy Gang' existed, and now one of its main members is investigating similar allegations in Donegal.

Case 3:
In 1995 Gardai ‘seized’ over 13 tonnes of cannabis worth about £130m, in a container truck in Urlingford, Co Kilkenny. The Garda had hired a trawler at Castletownbere and travelled 300 miles off the south coast to rendezvous with a ship and bring in the largest consignment of cannabis ever landed in Ireland. It was directly imported by the Gardai. The supposed ‘sting’ was that a major drug dealer would be lured to Urlingford to pick it up and then arrested. This never happened and the Gardai had to find and seize drugs they already owned. In 1995 Pat Byrne, now the Garda Commissioner, was a deputy commissioner responsible for all Garda anti-drugs measures. It has never been explained what went wrong, why the dealers targeted were not arrested, or who approved the Gardai to import Ireland’s largest drug shipment and used taxpayers money to fund it.

Recently there has been much media comment on the revelation that not one of the Gardai openly filmed batoning peaceful 'May Day' traffic protestors on Dame Street could recognise their colleagues. The May Day events have become a bit of a cause celebre for the media. It did not help the police case that one of those battered was a journalist and it was a bit of a boo-boo to hammer the hippie offspring of the middle classes in broad daylight on a city street.

Much better to confine it to a five-on-one session in the early hours in the back of a squad car, or in one of those mysterious cells with stairs and dangerous doors. The victims of those assaults are invariably young working class males lacking any sympathetic media contacts.  While Republicans in general have been well aware of such police misconduct for many years, it is apparently news to a media spoon-fed on fantasy 'exclusives' from the Garda Press Office.

Earlier this year community activists in Dublin's Inner City tried to highlight the ongoing police persecution of a respected anti-drugs campaigner and his family. All members of the family involved, including a child of 14, have suffered dozens of cases of both petty and severe harassment for several years, to the extent that they are now determined to leave their current home and perhaps the country. Several weeks of contacting journalists resulted in just one article in a small local paper.

The Sunday Tribune recently reported that in the year 2002 one million euro will be paid by the state in out-of-court settlements to dozens of people who are suing the Gardai for false arrest or imprisonment, assault and malicious prosecution. Six million euro has been paid out in compensation over the past five years for breach of citizens' rights by Gardai. Cases settled out of court are not reported and plaintiffs sign confidentiality agreements, so such matters conveniently do not reach the papers. In addition to the 6 million euro paid out to citizens abused by Gardai, the taxpayer also the pays the costs of compensation for Gardai injured while on duty. Currently 1,500 Gardai (14% of the force) are suing the State for such compensation and the final cost is expected to top 80 million euro, which works out as an average payout of 40,000 euro per individual guard.

The latest available report of the Garda Complaints Board (GCB), for 1999, states that 1,400 complaints were received. Almost half of these - 643 - were deemed inadmissible, with another 181 being ruled 'vexatious'. 270 cases were withdrawn and 24 resolved informally. Of the 298 cases the Board actually adjudicated on, 100 were dealt with within the Gardai. That left 196 complaints going to the DPP to decide if the cases should go to court. Out of this just 9 cases came to court and in NONE of them was a Garda convicted. Put another way, over 10% of the force were the subject of complaints by private citizens and in NOT ONE of these instances was a Garda found to have exceeded his/her authority. So that’s the Garda Complaints Board, a complete waste of time.

The record of the GCB, appalling though it is, does not satisfy PJ Stone of the Guard's union, who claims that complaints about the behaviour of Gardai come "from people with subversive or criminal leanings". In reality, political activists have long ago given up complaining to the GCB and complaints from 'subversives' would hardly be entertained either, given the rapidity with which being linked to the term 'dissident' leads to five years in Portlaoise. The dubious conviction of Colm Murphy, in relation to the Omagh bombing, is but one example. The conviction was secured on the back of evidence from a Garda who had been proven to have written Murphy's "statements" himself, but the judge decided to ignore this merely incidental aspect of the conduct of the Garda investigation.

Stone's "subversive types" would undoubtedly include people like the respected priest and homeless campaigner Fr Peter McVerry, who recently claimed that a number of Gardai based at four different stations in Dublin city were repeatedly implicated in beatings of young homeless people picked up on the streets. He said that the same named Guards kept popping up in many cases and that the young people involved had long ago given up making complaints as it was the word of a street kid against that of a Garda. In addition they also feared worse brutality in the future if their names were linked to a complaint.

Given the massive over reaction of the Garda Emergency Response Unit (ERU) in Abbeylara, perhaps Fr McVerry's street kids should count themselves lucky. This year also saw the same unit shooting dead a fellow Garda during a bank raid in Abbeyleix. Removing guns from the ERU might be an appropriate response. However, in a recent announcement of his bright new future for policing in Ireland, the Minister for Justice revealed his plans for three new weapons to arm the Gardai. In addition to their current firearms he will equip the ERU with a 'beanbag' shotgun - of a type which has led to several deaths in the US. Also planned are chemically propelled missiles which can smash through windows and doors and a 'multi-purpose' grenade containing 'debilitating gas'. All of these will be provided for in a new Criminal Justice Act, which will also include the setting up of a national DNA database and the right of Gardai to take saliva samples without consent. Increased detention and search rights are planned. Also proposed are measures to allow the retention of data on the private phone calls, faxes, e-mails and internet usage of citizens for up to four years. The ICCL has pointed out that this plan would contravene EU data protection laws.

If any of these measures had a noticeable impact on the crime situation it is arguable that they could be justified, but past evidence would indicate this is unlikely. The number of indictable crimes rose by 18% in 2001 and the detection rate was just 41%, down by 1% on the previous year. However McDowell plans to increase the number of Gardai to 14,000 and wants increased funding of 50 million euro for them.

The trade-off for the new Criminal Justice Act is the promised new Garda Inspectorate, presented as a replacement for the utterly discredited Garda Complaints Board. McDowell has portrayed this reform as being akin to the Police Ombudsman in the North. However closer questioning revealed that the three person Inspectorate will contain a majority of people who are not Gardai, but only because anyone appointed who is a Garda will cease to be one while serving on the Inspectorate - a handy way of ensuring the quango still produces the right results.

The degree to which any government sponsored inspectorate or tribunal is motivated to impartially examine the role of Gardai is, of course, open to doubt. In relation to the Morris tribunal - which is investigating very serious allegations of Garda corruption in Donegal - the Minister for Justice has refused to provide for the legal costs of the McBrearty family. While the costs of legal advice for the Gardai involved will be covered by the state, the private citizens who are the injured parties have been unable to pay their lawyers since 1997 and have no guarantee of their costs being covered even at the end of several more years of legal investigations. The Minister for Justice claims this ensures 'equality' for all sides, though why the boss of the accused should have the final say on the legal funding of the offended persons is a bit unclear.

Minister McDowell's definitions of equality do, of course, differ quite considerably from those of any rational person. While out of the Dail and earning a crust writing for the Sunday Independent, he penned a few crocodile tears articles about the injustices the Department of Justice inflicted on immigrants. Within weeks of assuming office he was sending the mysterious Immigration Police - reputedly made up of ninety re-deployed and aging Branchers - to pick up and jail such threats to the state as a heavily pregnant 17 year old Malaysian girl working in a chipper in Kerry. 600 Gardai were mobilised to round up 140 'illegal immigrants', 125 of whom were found to be either legally working here or seeking asylum. But along with the subversives, the immigrants aren't the most popular minority, so little political harm ensued from 'Operation Hyphen'.

Insensitive as the 'round up the immigrants' stunt was, McDowell's most recent action will probably have wider implications, albeit the headlines are small so far. He recently refused a request from Amnesty International to inspect Ireland's prisons for a report they are conducting on racism within the prison system. Amnesty's Ireland director, Sean Love, described the Justice Department as 'secretive and paranoid' and pointed out that Amnesty has been permitted access to jails in states such as Nigeria, Russia and Afghanistan. Countries denying access included Turkey, China, Israel and now Ireland. McDowell's excuse for the exclusion was that something called the 'National Training and Development Institute' was currently investigating the jails and would let Amnesty know what they found out. That the truth might be a bit deeper was revealed in a radio interview where McDowell strongly criticised Amnesty for a poster campaign which implicated politicians in racist practises. The suspicion also arises that the truth of his withdrawal of funding for the 'Citizen Traveller' campaign, also rests on such a foundation.

Perhaps it is unreasonable to expect the Gardai to be transparent or accountable to the public when their political master decides policy based on his personal political prejudices and is answerable to no one.

Mags Glennon is based in Dublin and is a political activist with Working Class Action...10 Dec 2002