Sir, – I am watching the struggles of the Garda Síochána to contain the feud between two organised crime groups in Dublin’s north inner city. The Garda Commissioner, senior Garda management and various Ministers have assured us that the force – or the service, as it now is – is well resourced. And so it seems to be on the streets. You have to admire the courage of women and men, armed and unarmed, that patrol these streets, given the callousness shown by the killers to date.
But the visible presence on the street of these members is not having the desired effect, with the most recent murder apparently having been committed within a few hundred metres of a Garda checkpoint.
I suspect that while the physical tools to do the job may have been furnished – the cars, the firearms, etc – the people on the ground are lacking one vital part to make the resource allocation effective. That is intelligence. Police garner information and intelligence in two ways, from human intelligence sources (old-fashioned informers and through contact with the local population and community representatives) and, more recently in terms of policing historicity, through intercepts of electronic media (phones – both calls and device content, social media, email, etc).
After the findings of the Morris tribunal, the recruitment and deployment of informers by the Garda Síochána was to be regulated and controlled in a systematic way and was to ensure management control of the regime to ensure no abuses took place.
The system that was finally adopted also provided for a modicum of external judicial scrutiny by a judge appointed by the Government. The acronym given to this system is CHIS (Covert Human Intelligence Sources), and it simply does not work as it was intended. It is a version adopted from outside the jurisdiction and is not best suited to the manner in which the Garda Síochána works with and within communities in Ireland. The flow of information from informants is channelled through a bureaucratic process that makes it nigh on impossible to ensure that all information received actually moves up the intelligence chain and is available for analysis and action. Only information from those persons who have passed the difficult recruitment system receives official attention.
The management of the informant is often transferred from those Garda members in the locality who are best placed to make contact with the informer, to understand the context and placement of the informer in the community and in relation to the criminal or criminals under investigation, and to assist central intelligence management to categorise and weigh the value of the information.
Of course, a big problem with informers is that they are generally criminals; they are close to these crime groups because they, at a minimum, participate on the peripheries of the group’s criminal acts and likely engage in lesser acts themselves. Once recruited into CHIS an informer is strictly precluded from engaging in criminal acts. A member of the Garda Síochána cannot permit an agent acting on his or her behalf to commit a crime in which the State would become complicit. But an informer who cannot play out his natural role in the organised crime group will quickly fall under suspicion by his partners in crime who understand these systems. At best he’ll be discarded, and we know what the worst is. Why would anyone seek to assist the Garda Síochána when they are likely to expose themselves so quickly?
The legal regime in Ireland does not permit the concept of a “participating informant”; one where the informant is permitted on approval (perhaps by a senior police office or an officer of the DPP) to aid or assist in the commission of certain specified illegal activities in order to maintain cover with the organised crime group. This is permitted and works in many other jurisdictions. It would clearly require extraordinarily careful monitoring to execute – excluding, for example, all crimes against the person, but including, perhaps, such things as acquiring getaway cars – but it is not beyond us to draft such a process.
The difficulties I’ve outlined with this regime are recognised by many gardaí working on the street interface, and as a result, some Garda members are tempted to manage their informants on the quiet, avoiding engagement with centralised official processes. This means potentially valuable information may be lost and not available to those that might need it, those co-ordinating responses to organised crime groups.
Clearly there was historic abuse of informants by some Garda members that gave rise to the recommendations of Mr Justice Morris and the needed reforms. I suspect, however, that the pendulum has swung too far the other way and a balance needs to be found which restores one of the original strengths of the Garda Síochána.
The Garda Ombudsman furnished a report on this topic to the Minister for Justice in 2013; this report contained a number of recommendations to seek to improve the current informant management system. The report was published by Dáil Éireann and is still available on the Garda Síochána Ombudsman Commission website. To the best of my knowledge, none of its recommendations has been accepted or implemented. – Yours, etc,
RAY LEONARD,
Blessington,
Co Wicklow.