This week we were presented with a method for giving the impression that there are more gardai on the streets. It was a classic soundbite policy. Easy to sum up in a few words, looks like solid common sense and tends to come apart under close scrutiny after it has garnered the required headlines.
Oh, yes, there's one other vital element; it is couched in such vague terms that it can be adjusted enormously following public and media reaction while still retaining the same associated soundbite.
And so, on Thursday, the "uniformed warden" was born. It weighed in at around eight dozen column inches, its gender was unclear and there is some confusion over who's the father. The frontrunners would seem to include the Minister for the Environment and, at slightly longer odds, the Minister for Justice. Both have been associated with the policy in the newspapers, but neither seems to want to take custody of the little one.
One shouldn't be surprised. They are both bright people, and I think they might have realised that this policy was a mistake right from its conception.
The most obvious flaw is that we already have wardens. They usually wear uniforms and they are supposed to look after traffic offences and littering. Each local authority is empowered to hire people to carry out these tasks.
But does the sight of a traffic warden make you feel safer? Do you think muggers, rapists and bank robbers quake at their approach? Then there are the specifics of their brief. Other than policing local government regulations and scaring off criminals by their mere presence what, exactly, are these "new" people supposed to do? Two things, it appears.
First, they are to keep their eyes open so that they can spot public order offences and other criminal activities and then, using their "mobile communications", they should contact the Garda. I presume this means ringing them, using mobile phones.
It is not too difficult to imagine the sort of scenario this might bring about. A warden, in his nice new uniform, is patrolling St Stephen's Green. He spots a drug-dealer peddling his wares.
Or at least he thinks he does, as he's not trained for this sort of thing. Out comes the mobile and, luckily enough, he can get a signal and the battery hasn't gone flat. He starts to dial . . . and the drug-dealer spots him, or the dealer's spotters see him, and they go for him. And why wouldn't they? He's a jumped-up traffic warden who hasn't finished dialling the real cops.
He has no back-up, no power, no nothin'. We'd be creating a bunch of targets for violence and abuse with no practical means of protecting themselves.
Second, they are supposed to take over the liaison work with the community, to provide a friendly face of the law, or, to put it another way, to introduce a buffer between the Garda and the public. This is the last thing the Garda needs. The public is a vital source of information for it. Having close links with the community is essential to law-enforcement.
Given the high esteem in which our wardens are currently held, it would be impossible for them to fill this role, particularly as they will have almost no powers to act on any information they are given.
If someone is considering sticking their neck out by passing on the identity of a criminal, for example, they will certainly think twice if they know the details will have to go to a garda they don't know via an intermediary.
International experience with multiple police forces, which this appears to be the first step towards, has not been good. While I was with the Department of Justice, we were visited by some representatives of the authorities in the United States. They said that if they were sitting down with a blank sheet of paper again to plan policing they would not have gone for a separate Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA).
The reason they gave was that the result was a tendency by the different organisations to pass the buck in relation to responsibility for crime, or, that for particular, high-profile "busts", there would be a turf war, with everyone trying to claim they had been the heroes.
It has also led to practical problems in terms of co-ordination. Let me give you a hypothetical based on the US system. A man is found shot dead at the side of the interstate just outside a small town in, say, Florida. A quantity of narcotics is found on the body.
The following law enforcement agencies could or would get involved - the local sheriff's department, the Highway Patrol, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the DEA. Between them, they have to figure out who's in charge, how information is going to be passed among them and so on.
The Irish model is vastly more efficient. One police force investigates the crime, it is in charge and it doesn't have any obstacles to sharing information.
We do need more gardai on the streets, but the solution is not to spread the burden of upholding the law. What we need to be doing, apart from recruiting more, is removing the administrative tasks that eat up so much of their time. Simply by employing all civilian staff to deal with this work and allowing the police force to police, we can achieve what this scheme will not - a public that feels safer and is safer.