FINAL REPORT OF GARDA COMPLAINTS BOARD RAISES SERIOUS QUESTIONS
Wednesday, 1 August, 2007
The final annual report from the Garda Síochána Complaints Board raises two major questions that cannot be brushed aside or ignored.
The questions the Board Chairman Gordon Holmes raise have to do not so much with the Board’s own competence or capacity but with the willingness of the Gardaí themselves to take engage with the disciplinary process and to take it seriously.
These two major complaints by the outgoing Garda Complaints Board against the Garda Síochána itself – at headquarters and at ordinary member level – show a still ongoing and apparently ingrained attitude of resistance by Gardaí towards any system of oversight and accountability.
First, Mr Holmes queries the willingness of the Garda Commissioner to take minor complaints against Garda discipline seriously. In these cases, the Board refers the case to the Commissioner so that he can give the member advice, an admonition or a warning.
But it turns out that, in well over half the cases referred to the Commissioner under this procedure, no further action was taken at all.
Gordon Holmes says that effectively overruling the Board’s decision, in such a high percentage of cases, was not accidental. This is a worrying conclusion. Equally worrying is his conclustion that this position “was unsatisfactory in the extreme and can only add more fuel to the arguments about the Gardaí investigating the Gardaí”.
Second, Mr Holmes reports that there is an ingrained unwillingness on the part of the Gardaí, where a genuine bona fide mistake has been made, to offer apologies for that mistake.
He says that members of the Garda Síochána, “apparently on advice or instruction from their representative bodies”, in the main refuse to accept any attempt at an informal resolution of complaints against them.
“They do so because they are afraid, notwithstanding assurances to the contrary, that the matter might remain on their personal record. Thus the percentage in Ireland of cases informally resolved is minimal whilst in other jurisdictions it is an appreciable and acceptable method of resolution.”
Unless these issues are addressed, in the context of new and improved relations between the Garda Commissioner, the Garda representative bodies and the new Garda Ombudsman Commission, the worry is that there is no reason to presume that the new Commission will have any better success in engaging with the Garda Síochána than the old Complaints Board did.
The new Minister for Justice has a clear responsibility to ensure that the new system of Garda oversight is fully supported and assisted in its valuable work.
Finally, I would like to pay tribute to the remarkable work that Gordon Holmes has done as Chairperson on the Garda Complaints Board. With limited resources and required to operate a seriously inadequate system, Mr. Holmes played a major role in ensuring that legitimate complaints by members of the public were addressed. Our society owes him an enormous debt of gratitude.
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