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Nóirín O’Sullivan, who has announced she is to retire as Garda commissioner, was the first woman in the history of the State to hold the post.
Having joined the force in 1981, she had more than three decades of professional policing experience.
Her work with the Garda spanned both operational and administrative areas. Much of her early years with the force involved undercover work investigating major drugs gangs.
She was promoted to superintendent in 2000 and served in the Garda College with responsibility for specialist training.
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She also worked as a detective superintendent in the Garda National Drugs Unit, which is a specialist agency that investigates domestic and international drug trafficking. Its remit also includes strategically reducing the demand for drugs.
In 2003 she was promoted to chief superintendent and served as the head of the Garda Technical Bureau, which comprises experts in photography, ballistics, fingerprints and mapping. Using advanced equipment and techniques in the recovery and analysis of evidence, these teams investigate major and complicated crime scenes throughout the State.
Four years later she was promoted to assistant commissioner and served in the western region. She also worked in human resource management.
In 2009 she was appointed assistant commissioner for crime and security, which comprises security and intelligence, liaison and protection, crime policy and administration, and the special detectives unit.
Two years later she was again promoted, this time to deputy commissioner of operations. When, on March 25th 2014, former Garda commissioner Martin Callinan retired, she was made interim commissioner with immediate effect.
On the day of her appointment as commissioner the following November, Ms O'Sullivan told the media at Garda Headquarters that An Garda Síochána had been through an "unprecedented time" following a string of controversies and a number of critical reports into malpractice and abuse of process.
She pledged then to use a highly critical Garda Inspectorate report as a “roadmap” for the future of the force.
She said rank and file gardaí haf been “hurting” as a result of the controversies and that part of the task before her would be to lift morale.
“People have been hurting. We’ve gone through a huge roller-coaster of uncertainty and we’ve been through an unprecedented time.
“There are certainly things that we have to do differently. There are lessons. I don’t underestimate the big body of work that we have to do in the coming weeks and months and years.”
Ms O’Sullivan is a graduate of the FBI National Executive Institute’s law-enforcement course for police chiefs worldwide.
She also holds first class honours in diploma and MA courses in business and advanced management from the Michael Smurfit School of Business in UCD.
In a statement, Ms O’Sullivan said she was retiring “after 36 years of privileged, enjoyable and proud service”.
She notified Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and Minister for Justice Charlie Flanagan this afternoon, thanking them for their continued confidence in her.
She also thanked former taoiseach Enda Kenny and former tánaiste and minister for justice Frances Fitzgerald.
“The support for me to continue in the role is evident. However, I devoted much of my summer break to considering if continuing would be the right thing to do.
“It has become clear, over the last year, that the core of my job is now about responding to an unending cycle of requests, questions, instructions and public hearings involving various agencies including the Public Accounts Committee, the Justice and Equality Committee, the Policing Authority, and various other inquiries, and dealing with inaccurate commentary surrounding all of these matters,” Ms O’Sullivan said.
“They are all part of a new – and necessary – system of public accountability. But when a commissioner is trying – as I’ve been trying – to implement the deep cultural and structural reform that is necessary to modernise and reform an organisation of 16,000 people and rectify the failures and mistakes of the past, the difficulty is that the vast majority of her time goes, not to implementing the necessary reforms and meeting the obvious policing and security challenges, but to dealing with this unending cycle.”