Pay the Garda Commissioner more, says head of Policing Authority

The pay and conditions on offer for the next Garda Commissioner will have to be significantly improved if world-class candidates from overseas are to be attracted to apply, the head of the Policing Authority has said.

This might mean paying their costs of moving to and from Ireland and improving other parts of the package, rather than addressing salary alone: "You would certainly have to look at the package," said Josephine Feehily.

The nature of the relationship between senior officers at the “apex” of the Garda and the Government has remained unchanged despite the establishment of the authority, she said.

She pointed out that while bodies such as the authority in other jurisdictions were responsible for appointing senior officers in the police forces, this was not the case in the Republic. The authority did not appoint the Garda commissioner or deputy commissioners, and the commissioner was still accountable to the minister for justice of the day.

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Ms Feehily was speaking to The Irish Times 24 hours after the latest public session of the authority. During that session, which was open to the public and media and streamed live online, Ms Feehily had some firm exchanges with Garda Commissioner Nóirín O'Sullivan.

She was questioning Ms O’Sullivan and her team of senior gardaí on the recent scandals surrounding the inflating of alcohol breath-test data, thousands of wrongful convictions and now the wrongful classification of some homicides as non-fatal assaults causing harm.

Public sessions

The public sessions are new and Ms Feehily believes they are a key part of the authority’s work in its role of overseeing the Garda.

She said big and complex organisations tended to be called before Oireachtas committees very infrequently in Ireland. The plan for the senior Garda officers to appear before the authority bimonthly was new.

“Persistence doesn’t happen very often,” she said of the questioning of Irish institutions or public servants in public.

During Thursday’s hearing Ms Feehily was clearly annoyed the Garda still had no information about how the breath-testing data had been inflated. And she was also disappointed “material” but not an “actual report” on the problems with the homicide data had been presented to the authority, and as late as 8:30pm on Wednesday.

Speaking to The Irish Times in her office in Smithfield in Dublin's north inner city, Ms Feehily sounded exasperated about the lack of progress in explaining how gardaí all over the country had inflated breath-testing data when compiling their records.

A month had passed since the debacle came to light and an interim report had been compiled by the Garda and submitted to the authority. But a review of practices in the southern region had found inflating of figures also two years ago.

“The so-called examination, audit – whatever you want to call it; I’m surprised that that didn’t formulate some hypothesis,” she said.

“That document found [inflating of] 17 per cent; still a sizeable number. I was surprised that that process did not attempt to attach reasons in its own box; ‘We’ve found this problem in the southwest and here are the reasons for it.’ That’s why it can’t be called an audit, quite frankly.”

While Ms O’Sullivan had gathered up hundreds of recommendations from the various Garda Inspectorate reports in recent years and formulated a modernisation and reform policy from it, progress was not clear in every area.

Ms O’Sullivan’s document was “huge” and it was not easy to determine if specific reforms had been included in the document and/or acted upon.

Ms Feehily said it was clear there was lots of activity and reform plans in the Garda at present. But it was difficult to assess of the reforms had “landed”.

“There’s quite a lot of them that certainly haven’t been advanced with any kind of energy. There’s no point in being coy about that,” she said.

“There is a lot of activity and progress with some of the actions. It’s hard to find finality yet, which is perhaps understandable. And then some of the pieces we are not sure about yet; about the extent of the progress.”

Cultural reform

However, she pointed out that between accelerated recruitments and retirements, over the next four years about 35 per cent of the Garda would be new. This would happen in the period to 2021.

“That’s a huge opportunity for change; it’s only four and a bit years.”

The Garda’s training for new entrants had also changed of late. And when recruitment was being accelerated at the same that training was changing, real and lasting cultural reform was possibly quickly.

With the authority having had only three staff when it became operational on January 1st, 2016, it now has more than 20.

Ms Feehily said she was concerned when the Government asked the authority to frame a new Garda code of ethics in its first year of operation.

She said the Garda Síochána Act 2005 had provided for it and yet by 2016 no progress had been made.

It is now completed and published in booklet form for Garda members and the public.

It now needed to become embedded in training and decision-making as well as “attached” to competencies in the promotions process. And there was also great merit in making it available to the public in order that they would know how a Garda member could behave and challenge them to conduct themselves accordingly if standards slipped in interactions.

“They can say: ‘But it says here this is how you are supposed to behave.’ You’re empowering citizens to say back to a garda: ‘This is your code of ethics, the Garda code.’

“You connect it with promotions, you connect it with supervision and you connect it with your expectations at sergeant level and superintendent level and on parade: you connect it with the daily work until it becomes part of the culture.”

The code is underpinned by nine principles, from committing to “uphold and obey the law” in a “fair and impartial way” to “everyone in the Garda is responsible for challenging and reporting wrongdoing”.

However, while Ms Feehily feels young people joining the Garda were now from a “changed gene pool” in a more modern Ireland, some outside the force needed to examine their role in Garda reform.

For example, she said when Ms O’Sullivan’s position was under pressure as recent controversies erupted, many in politics sought to involve the Policing Authority by suggesting it could dismiss Ms O’Sullivan.

She agreed with the suggestion some in Fianna Fáil and Labour sought to bring her and the authority into the public discourse as a weapon to be used against Ms O'Sullivan.

It had been forgotten that the authority had been created to take politics out of policing.

“Why on Earth the political system would expect the authority, which had only barely been established, to get involved in something where the decision-maker, the Government, had full line of sight of all the issues: certainly that didn’t make sense to me.”

The mooted commission on the future of policing in Ireland needed to examine what form of accountability the Oireachtas wanted to have over the Garda.

That commission could also examine the possibility of allowing foreign police officers apply for senior Garda posts. It would bring in a fresh way at looking at culture problems missed by people who had been around for so long they could not see them.

“Any organisation that is closed, where there is one front door, has a closed culture,” she said.

“And closed cultures have strengths, like loyalty and discipline. And they have weaknesses, like the wrong kind of loyalty.”