Delay in drafting policy on personal relationships between gardaí and criminals

Garda management has yet to produce rules on how gardaí should handle personal relationships with criminals, five months after the expiry of a deadline for developing such a policy.

The creation of rules detailing how the force should handle “notifiable associations” between gardaí and members of the public was recommended by the Garda Síochána Inspectorate in a 2020 report entitled Countering the Threat of Internal Corruption.

It was part of a wide range of proposed reforms which formed the basis for the establishment of a Garda anti-corruption unit shortly afterwards.

In policing terms, notifiable relationships include instances where officers have personnel or family relationships with known or suspected criminals. In some police forces they include relationships with journalists and private investigators.

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The issue of potentially inappropriate relationships between investigators and criminals has come to the fore again in recent months. An investigator with the Garda Síochána Ombudsman Commission last month admitted to attending a party celebrating the acquittal of gangland figure Gerard Hutch for the 2016 Regency Hotel murder.

The investigator, who has since resigned, was arrested by the Garda National Bureau of Criminal Investigation last week on suspicion of revealing sensitive information to the Hutch gang.

Several serving and retired gardaí are also under investigation for providing confidential information to the Hutch gang. These include John Murphy, a retired superintendent, who is currently serving a 6½-year term for possessing cannabis worth almost €260,000.

Gardaí are investigating if Murphy was harvesting information from serving members and then passing it on to the Hutch gang, giving it vital insight into ongoing investigations into the crime group.

A number of serving gardaí suspected of passing information to Murphy were suspended from the force in 2021. A detective with the special detective unit was arrested last March as part of the same investigation. They are all understood have strongly denied any wrongdoing.

The Garda inspectorate also came across multiple incidents of gardaí socialising with criminal suspects or having family members linked to criminal activity. These associations came to light only during investigations of the criminal suspects “and had not been disclosed by the members concerned,” it said.

It also became aware of a person who applied to be a garda while failing to mention a family member with criminal connections.

“This matter came to light only when this person had commenced their training at the Garda college and another Garda member who had served in the area where the applicant lived raised concerns about the family association with a supervisor,” it said.

Many police forces in the UK have detailed policies on such relationships, including that they be immediately reported to a supervisor. The inspectorate recommended that the force should develop and implement policy and guidance on these relationships which all members would be “obliged to report”.

An implementation plan for the recommendations was published last year by the Garda and the Department of Justice committing them to developing a policy document by the end of December and circulating it to Garda members by the end of last month. This was to be followed by briefings and instruction sessions on the policy.

Both of these deadlines have been missed.

Asked about the progress of the policy, a Garda spokesman said: “A notifiable association policy and associated procedures remain under development by An Garda Síochána.”