After the second report of the Morris tribunal, it may be time to bury the myth of the "few rotten apples" that allegedly get our police force an undeserved reputation. The thing about rotten apples is that, when left in the barrel, they cause the other apples to rot as well, writes John Waters.
The point of the old saw is that it takes just one rotten apple to destroy all the others. When an actual rotten apple is found in a literal barrel, what has to happen is that the presumption of rottenness extends to all the apples until otherwise proved. Rotten apples must be removed.
What the Morris report tells us, beyond its detail, is that rotten apples were virtually a protected species in An Garda Síochána in Donegal, that the covering-up of wrongdoing was all but a matter of official policy.
This means that, far from reassuring ourselves with vacuous platitudes, we now need to be considering the possibility that the entirety of our police force is corrupted. We may hope that this is not so, but we cannot afford to assume it is not.
There is no room for bland pronouncements of confidence in the integrity of the majority of officers, for litanies of the good or dirty work that Garda officers do on our behalf.
What the tribunal report has established is not merely that negligence, prejudice, abuse and cover-up were part of the culture of the force in Donegal, but that this reality, when it came to the attention of senior officers, did not surprise them.
Even this construction assumes there was a point when such practices "came to the attention" of senior Garda officers. But neither can this be assumed.
What must be assumed is what common sense tells us: that rottenness was the natural state of the Garda in that part of the country, and that all concerned took this for granted.
And assuming this of Donegal, the "rotten apple" in the policing barrel of the State, we have to assume it also of everywhere else. The events in Donegal came to light only by virtue of the grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre and unprecedented nature of a case in which two men were framed for a murder that never took place.
We cannot afford the self-indulgence of assuming that this, in either its particulars or general implications, is an isolated case.
Since I spoke on the Late Late Show three weeks ago about a personal experience with a particular garda, I have been inundated with communications from people with much worse stories to tell. The allegations range from arbitrariness, to petty bullying, to harassment, to casual brutality, to attempted extortion, to cavalier disregard for court orders, to summary justice.
Many of them tell also of a culture in which such things are not merely taken for granted, but apparently condoned if not actively promoted by those in authority. If even half of them are half true, the barrel that is An Garda Síochána is already half rotten.
My story was of an incident in Castlebar many years ago, in which I had been badly beaten as a result of stumbling into the battlezone between two warring gangs. When, on the day after the incident I went to the Garda station in Westport to report it, the sergeant behind the desk surveyed my jeans, bloody T-shirt, toothless mouth and swollen head and pronounced: "You were probably f***in' lookin' for it anyway." As a result, for all of my adult years, my expectation of finding justice in a Garda station has been about 50 per cent.
Conventional piety would here have me emphasise that, of course, the vast majority of gardaí are unimpeachable and decent. Frankly, I don't know about that. That most people feel impelled to enter such a rider suggests an unhealthy reluctance to be heard criticising the guards.
If it were simply a matter of "a couple of bad apples", why do we feel the need to distance ourselves from demands that these be removed from the barrel? Perhaps because, deep down, we fear that, pulled over one day by a traffic cop for premature entry into a bus lane, our temerity will return to haunt us.
In truth, whether through poor training or the operation of the principle that power always corrupts, there is an ingrained and profound problem with our police force. An Garda Síochána is riddled with small time bullies, who spend much of their time tormenting perfectly innocent citizens, particularly young men.
I have no ulterior reason for criticising the Garda. I have never been "in trouble with the law". I have a single conviction for driving an uninsured vehicle when I was 21. Otherwise, my slate is clean. But my sense is that our police force is at best only marginally to be trusted. And any time I make such an observation in public, I find myself snowed under with accounts from people with similar views and experiences to substantiate them, perhaps because they feel liberated from the general culture of piety about such matters in the public domain.