Gardai in Dublin said yesterday there was little that could be done to protect officers from the type of incident at Tallaght where Sgt Andy Callanan was killed in an arson attack.
Some gardai expressed concern that there was not enough protection for officers working night shifts in about 40 stations in the city.
The typical reception area in a Dublin station, known as the public office, has a section house officer (the sergeant in charge, as Sgt Callanan was in Tallaght) and one or two young gardai. Sgt Callanan was accompanied in the public office in Tallaght by a probation garda, John Malone.
There is little protection for officers against someone determined to cause damage to them or the station.
One officer said the incident was "waiting to happen". He was critical of what he said was an increasing trend towards making station public offices more amenable to the public.
The notion of making stations less daunting for the public has been an element of the "community policing" philosophy which has influenced thinking on policing procedures from the late 1980s onwards. Terms such as "quality of service" to "customers" and greater openness at stations have become important to improving relations between the force and the public.
Anyone telephoning a station in recent years will have noticed that phones are usually answered promptly, with an officer giving the name of the station followed by his own name. The idea that people with a better impression of gardai as "service providers" will react more favourably and help them to counter criminal activity, is central to policing philosophy. Terms like "identifying client needs" and "service design" permeate reports on improving community relations.
Part of the philosophy was the "softening" of reception areas in modern stations such as Tallaght, which was built in 1988. The idea was that old stations, with their bleak reception areas and with gardai answering calls through hatches, hampered communications with clients and gave an old-fashioned and daunting image to the force.
New reception areas are designed to look more like high street banks or even hotel reception areas. People are offered an easier, more amenable environment in which to communicate with police.
Tallaght has a large reception area for the public, and Sgt Callanan and his colleagues on night duty had the benefit of being separated from the public space by a glass partition. While there is no doubt that such conditions help people to communicate with the gardai, officers who work night duties in Dublin tend to take a different view. There have been two incidents in which men have threatened to set fire to themselves in reception areas in recent years.
One man badly injured himself, but officers protected behind partitions were not in immediate danger.
Dublin gardai agreed that Sgt Callanan and the young garda who was with him were the victims of an extraordinary incident which could probably not be prevented without resorting to security measures like those in RUC stations, where reception areas are fortified to withstand violent attack, but which are highly daunting places for the public.
Officers who spoke to The Irish Times agreed there was a need, especially in the immediate future, for improved security in stations at night as there was a possibility that the attack on Tallaght station might prompt a disturbed person to carry out a similar attack.