One of the great success stories of the State - an unarmed police force which enjoyed full community support - is being tarnished. But the writing was on the wall long before the Morris tribunal, writes Fintan O'Toole
The short history of independent Ireland is littered with failures, missed opportunities and institutional inadequacy. One thing the new State got right, however, was policing.
The creation of an unarmed, democratically accountable police force that could win the consent of the vast majority of the population in the shadow of a brutal civil war stands as an extraordinary achievement.
The loss of public confidence in the Garda would therefore be not just an alarming development in itself, but the final step in a long and desperate process. The question which hovers over the Morris inquiry is whether there is anyone left to trust.
The political system has been tarnished by corruption. The Catholic church has been undermined by the pitiful response of its leaders to the exploitation of children by clergy members. The business establishment and some professions have come very badly out of a long sequence of scandals, most recently the Ansbacher scam. If half of the allegations being investigated by Justice Morris turn out to be true, the question of who guards the guards will be much more than a rhetorical flourish.
The creation of the Garda Síochána was a superb administrative achievement, with a force of 3,000 men deployed as early as the end of 1922. It was also, however, an extraordinary leap of political faith. In a deeply divided society, which had experienced near anarchy in many areas, there must have seemed an element of wishful thinking in the admonition of the Minister for Home Affairs, Kevin O'Higgins to a passing-out parade of new recruits in 1923: "The internal politics and political controversies of the country are not your concern."
It is no exaggeration to say that the vindication of O'Higgins's belief that an unarmed, impartial police force could replace the armed, highly politicised RIC had international significance. The Garda has worked through the United Nations to promote the Irish model of policing as one which has special benefits for societies emerging out of conflict. In that sense, a great deal of Irish pride, not just at home but abroad, is tied up with the notion that we've got policing right.
It may be, however, that the very success of the Garda in winning broad public trust has contributed to the present crisis of confidence. Justified pride can gradually shade into smugness. If we had not been so smug, we might have noticed the warning signals that have been flashing since the 1970s.
The roots of the present trouble almost certainly lie in the relatively sudden emergence in the early 1970s of a more serious challenge than the Garda had faced since its earliest days. The IRA's campaign in Northern Ireland, with its turbulent wake of armed robberies, kidnappings and intimidation in the Republic, initially made the Garda look impotent.
The response from at least a section of the force was to get results by any means necessary. Don Buckley and Joe Joyce exposed in The Irish Times the operation of a so-called Heavy Gang which roughed-up suspects in order to extract confessions. Although these revelations were fiercely condemned, it is now clear that many within the force shared precisely the same concerns.
In his autobiography, Garret FitzGerald, then Minister for Foreign Affairs in the Fine Gael/Labour coalition, reveals a private approach from two Garda officers. They told him that although many allegations of brutality were false, "it was believed by some in the force that confessions had been extracted by improper methods, and Garda morale would be seriously damaged if these cases went ahead and some gardaí were persuaded to perjure themselves in the process".
This was the time for the rot to be stopped, but FitzGerald's attempts to raise the issue within the government were unproductive. Even the most spectacular example of a miscarriage of justice resulting from the practice of using physical intimidation to extract confessions - the investigation of the Sallins train robbery of which Nicky Kelly was the best-known victim - did not produce radical reform.
From the area of alleged subversive crime, the use of dubious methods spread to more normal Garda investigations. Again, the public received fair warning in the infamous Kerry Babies case of 1984, in which Joanne Hayes confessed to a murder she could not possibly have committed. Since the case dominated the headlines for months, it ought to have been the occasion for a serious public and political reflection on the state of the Garda and the need for independent oversight of its operations.
Again, however, nothing happened.
A striking example of the lack of political will is the issue of the video recording of the interrogation of suspects in serious cases. The idea emerged in the late 1970s as a response to the Heavy Gang allegations. It was incorporated into the 1984 Criminal Justice Act, and many assumed it would then become standard practice. However, the regulations governing the taping of interrogations were not introduced until 1997, and even now only a handful of Garda stations are properly equipped.
The governing attitude in the face of continuing subversive activity and rising rates of serious crime seems to have been an extreme reluctance to acknowledge any problems within the Garda. Instead of protecting the institution, however, this has in fact threatened its most precious asset: the trust of the law-abiding public.
Even without the extraordinary events in Donegal, the consequences have been stark. The judiciary, which used to regard Garda evidence in court almost as gospel truth, has been forced into expressions of disgust.
In the case of Colm Murphy, charged with offences in relation to the Omagh bombing, Justice Barr found it necessary to describe Garda evidence as "outrageous" and "persistent lying on oath". The same judge was equally critical of Garda evidence in the case of Paul Ward who was charged with the murder of Veronica Guerin.
We have had the dreadful case of Dean Lyons, who confessed to murders he did not commit and subsequently committed suicide. In the case of Fred Flannery, charged with the 1994 murder of Denis O'Driscoll in Cork, where evidence was withheld not just from the defence but also from the prosecution, Garda behaviour was described by the judge as "appalling". Add in the cases of Peter Pringle, Vincent Connell, the so-called Tallaght Two, the apparent mishandling of the Abbeylara siege and this week's charging of a number of gardaí over alleged attacks on peaceful demonstrators in Dublin, and it is clear that the problems don't begin or end in Donegal.
The most serious aspect of this is not that abuses occur, but that there is no strong evidence of a willingness to deal with them firmly and openly. The traditional warm relationship between the Garda and the mainstream of the Irish public seems to be regarded as a protective shield. Public trust is seen, not as a precious asset which has to be continually re-enforced, but as proof that all is still right with the world. This attitude is bitterly unfair, not just to the public, but to the large majority of gardaí who do their work with pride and dedication. Most people in Ireland can still identify with the average member of the force as a kind, decent, often courageous public servant, professional in traumatic times and cheerful in the ordinary interactions of daily life.
We will only know how much we will miss that relationship when it's gone. And the reality is that it is moving ever closer to collapse. Social changes and the re-organisation of the force mean that fewer Irish people know their local guard as a member of the community. Positive, mundane contact is becoming more rare. It is the more abstract public image of the force that increasingly forms the image of the Garda for most citizens.
That image has been woefully eroded over the last three decades, and if the Morris tribunal lasts, as expected, for two years, we are in for an almost daily diet of bad-tasting revelations. The Abbeylara inquiry, of course, is also on the way. Whatever the conclusions of those two inquiries, no one can doubt that there are uncomfortable days ahead. All the more important, then, that the Government does not wait for those reports before beginning the process of reform. It is starkly obvious that the Garda can't continue to live in the warm glow of the remarkable achievements of 1922 and 1923.
As it happens, there is also on this island an exemplary dissection of how bad things get when a police force loses the consent of the citizens and of how to fix it when it does. It is the report of the Patten Commission, and the case for the Republic to put into practice the reforms it has urged on the North is now as urgent as it is overwhelming.