Sir, - Your picture of a garda in Star Wars gear and armed to the teeth (The Irish Times, April 22nd) is truly frightening evidence of a renewed threat to the Irish ideal of an unarmed policy service.
It is deeply disturbing to learn that the Garda inquiry into the Abbeylara tragedy will consider the use of what are described as non-lethal weapons. Has Irish society changed so radically that we would even contemplate arming the Garda Siochana with stun-guns?
In modern Irish history, we have stood at few crossroads so profoundly threatening to our way of life.
It must be asked if the Emergency Response Unit, established to deal with aircraft hijackings and armed subversives, was ever intended to be deployed in the circumstances at Abbeylara.
There was a time when an unarmed Garda sergeant, relying on local knowledge and native wit, succeeded in overcoming a distressed neighbour armed with a shotgun or a pitchfork. In a difficult case, small reinforcements might arrive. But no guns - and no media frenzy. Somehow the patient would be disarmed, perhaps after a struggle. I cannot recall a single incident of death or serious injury.
The courage and compassion of the gardai more often than not passed unnoticed, except when the award of a Scott Medal a year later made the pages of the Garda Review. A paragraph, perhaps, in the local newspaper - the incident played down out of respect for the family.
In an editorial 20 years ago commenting on the shooting of an innocent bystander by gardai in pursuit of armed criminals, The Irish Times concluded that such accidents were preventable. I disagreed: accidents in the use of firearms were not preventable.
The aggressive nature of ERU duties must create a problem for young men coming out of the Garda College steeped in the psychology of the unarmed posture of the force.
The Defence Forces are recruited, trained and specially disciplined to carry and use firearms. Gardai are not soldiers, nor by temperament are they paramilitary police.
What is at stake is the moral authority of the Government. Commissioner Michael Staines in 1922 defined the role of the Civic Guard in terms of the moral authority of an unarmed policy; Pope Pius XI, addressing members of the Garda Siochana in Rome in 1928, redefined the principle of moral authority for a police force in a Christian society, "valid for all time".
If the ideals upholding the Garda Siochana are to survive, it seems inescapable that the ERU should be stood down and its operations transferred to the Army, to be called out in aid of the civic power in appropriate circumstances.
It will also be necessary to restructure the force to recover whatever has been compromised in the close relations between communities and their local gardai.
This essential rapport - personal identity and trust in the individual garda, not in the impersonal institution - was all but lost when rural stations, against the advice of successive commissioners, were closed left, right and centre, and Garda management was hamstrung by the recommendations of the Conroy Commission 30 years ago.
Recommended reading: Jackson, J.: The Irish Army and the development of the constabulary concept, in Jacques van Doorn (ed.), Armed Forces and Society: Den Haag, Mouton, 1968. - Yours, etc.,
Gregory Allen, Upper Kilmacud Road, Blackrock, Co Dublin.