The desire to be seen doing something

Time and again in recent years the question has had to be asked: where were the guards? Garda action on political, planning and big-business corruption has been notable by its absence. Police interventions in these areas have generally been slow and cautious reactions to revelations by the media or tribunals.

Nor, in spite of some superb investigative work by a few teams of gardaí, has there been much evidence of a coherent, pro-active approach to church collusion in child abuse.

When these questions are raised, the answers are fairly consistent. The Garda can only act on specific information and complaints. Large-scale operations might be good for the optics, but are not good police practice. The desire to make political gestures by sending in the guards must be resisted. Garda operations must never be motivated by the simple desire to be seen to be doing something.

Fair enough. What, though, are we to make of last July's much-hyped Operation Hyphen? This huge show of force, aimed allegedly at illegal immigrants, took place in the Dublin region on July 16th and elsewhere in the State on July 23rd. Houses were raided at dawn. People were dragged away from pubs, hotels and restaurants where they were working. There was a simultaneous media blitz, with the Garda press office and the new Minister for Justice, Michael McDowell, making tough noises about the need to uphold the law.

It is now perfectly clear that Operation Hyphen was little more than a propaganda exercise conducted at the expense of many decent, hard-working and entirely innocent individuals. Figures given by McDowell in the Dáil this month in response to questions from Ruairí Quinn present a shocking picture.

A huge Garda force was deployed for the operation: 200 in Dublin and 400 in the rest of the country. Nearly 300 premises were raided. In all, 140 people were arrested. In the attendant publicity, the impression was clearly given that these people were suspected of being illegal immigrants, or failed asylum-seekers against whom deportation orders had been issued.

The truth is that just 16 of the 140 people arrested were actually evading deportation orders. Fifteen of these people have been deported, and one was released for medical reasons but will be deported later.

Seventy-four were not asylum-seekers at all. It seems that a small number were illegal immigrants in the normal sense of the phrase: people who had no official status. Most, however, seem to have been people who came here legally with work permits.

Their breaches of the regulations were minor and technical. Some had failed to register with their local Garda station. Most, seem to have been victims of the State's inefficient bureaucracy rather than of their own neglect.

In Co Clare, for example, 12 people working in the catering industries were charged under Operation Hyphen. The employer of five of them, the Lisdoonvarna hotelier, Jim White, pointed out that he had applied to renew their work permits the previous December, but the applications had not yet been processed by the State. Technically, these people were indeed illegal migrants. Yet without them, the tourist industry would collapse: 85 per cent of White's staff in Lisdoonvarna are non-national.

It is also notable that the charges against all 12 people in Clare were thrown out of court because they were improperly drafted. In other words, people were charged with not having their paperwork in order and released because the people who charged them couldn't get their paperwork in order.

THE third category of people arrested under Operation Hyphen is the most scandalous of all. If there were 16 failed asylum-seekers and 74 people charged with mostly technical breaches of the immigration laws, that means that 50 people were arrested for no reason whatsoever.

The wrong done to these people is not just an individual injustice. The very public nature of the operation made it, in effect if not in intent, a piece of anti-immigrant propaganda. It played into a set of stereotypes in a way that could only reinforce prejudice and criminalise entire categories of people.

In the light of the Taoiseach's extraordinary decision last week to promote Noel O'Flynn, the most virulently anti-immigrant TD, to the chairmanship of a Dail committee, it is hard not to see the whole show as a gesture of appeasement towards the far right.

I don't know how much Operation Hyphen cost, though the deployment of 600 gardaí doesn't come cheap. What's significant, however, is that Michael McDowell doesn't know either. He was, he told the Dáil, "not in a position to furnish the House with the cost of Operation Hyphen".

This suggests that the cost of the operation, in terms either of financial layout or of the diversion of Garda resources from the investigation of far more serious crimes, was simply not an issue. When it comes to using gardaí to make a political gesture, all such considerations can be brushed aside. Provided, of course, the target is a vulnerable, voiceless group and not a corrupt but powerful institution.