Ethnicity and Garda recruitment: the challenges of cultural diversity

Maciej Makowski, or Matt as most Irish people call him, took an unusual route into the Garda.

He had little interest in becoming a police officer when arriving in Ireland from Poland in the mid-2000s. Then the home he shared with a roommate in Dublin 8 was burgled.

“We came back and saw the place ransacked. I was the one who had good English so I was the one who rang the guards.

“Then the thought came into my head that there might be a need in the guards to speak the language. So that really is the genesis. It wasn’t planned. I never had any ideas of being a police officer.

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In 2007, Makowski joined up, becoming the first-ever Polish garda, a fact commemorated in a glass plaque presented to him by the force in 2019.

Speaking of his time in the force, he has few complaints of racism or discrimination. “It was welcoming and it was chaotic.”

Back then, at a time when about 10 per cent of the country’s population was born overseas, the Garda had decided to launch a recruitment process aimed at encouraging foreign nationals to join up. To this end, the Irish language requirement had been dropped for foreign candidates two years previously.

Instead of being singled out, the new foreign gardaí were treated exactly the same as other members, Makowski recalled, even if it meant ignoring the policing advantages they gave the force.

“I don’t think there was a plan in place for how to use them. For example there was certain places where there was high populations of Polish people or Russians or Nigerians or whatever.

“In the initial years, it didn’t seem there was a plan to put recruits into those areas to utilise them. People got given their stations randomly. There was no special treatment, you were a Garda member and that’s it.”

Polish garda

Makowski was assigned to Blanchardstown Garda Station and a frontline policing role. How did the Irish public react to the novel sight of a Polish garda on the beat? "Sometimes there was challenges. There was a couple of times when I dealt with a republican element or a wannabe republican element and you'd hear things like, 'Where the hell did you come from? You're only a mercenary.'

“But I just laughed at that stuff and it was marginal really.”

During one court appearance where he was due to give evidence in the prosecution of a driver, Makowski was taken to be the defendant: “Basically everyone thought I was the defendant in that case because of the foreign name,” he recalled.

Makowski qualified as a detective and was transferred to the Garda's growing Cybercrime Bureau where he remained until taking early retirement in 2019. His decision to leave early had nothing to do with his background, he said. Instead, Makowski, like many of his Irish colleagues, was unhappy with how the Garda was evolving.

“The reality on the ground is there is too much bureaucracy, too much paperwork, too much toxic oversight. So there was a lot of different things that pushed me in that direction.”

Many other foreign nationals have followed in Makowski's footsteps since 2007. According to a Garda spokesman, as the force marks its 100th anniversary this year, there are currently members from Belarus, Brazil, Cameroon, China, England, German, India, Iran, Italy, Lithuania, Morocco, Nigeria, Pakistan, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Wales and Zimbabwe.

Former Police Service of Northern Ireland officer Paula Hilman had a shorter journey to make when the Belfast-born native moved south to the Garda's HQ in Phoenix Park.

Minority recruitment

Today, Assistant Commissioner Hilman oversees the Garda Diversity and Integration Unit: “People tell us when they see someone who looks like them in a police service it increases their confidence in policing,” she told The Irish Times. A series of measures have been taken to encourage minority recruitment, including a change to the Garda uniform policy to allow members wear religious headgear such as hijabs or turbans.

Diversity is not just a virtue in itself. It also brings additional benefits, Hilman says. “It brings with it stronger decision-making, challenges to traditional thinking and it builds stronger teams.”

But change comes slowly. Foreign nationals make up about 13 per cent of the population. Their representation in the Garda is far lower.

Just how much lower is something of a mystery. Although the Garda is able to provide a general outline of which countries its members come from, it cannot say what percentage are born overseas.

Similarly there are no figures for how many gardaí come from a Traveller background. It is understood there is currently a small number of Traveller gardaí but the hard data simply does not exist.

"An Garda Síochána has no statutory authority for collecting data based on ethnicity. This is not just an issue solely relating to An Garda Síochána, but a wider public policy issue," a spokesman said.

Indeed anyone who attended a passing-out ceremony in Templemore recently – where freshly attested gardaí parade in front of proud family members – will realise that the majority of gardaí still come from a narrow sector of society, that is middle-class, straight, white males.

Social class

People tend to talk about diversity solely in the context of ethnicity, says Bob Collins, chairman of the Policing Authority. "Whereas there is a whole range of diversities which are not adequately reflected in An Garda Síochána or indeed in many aspects of Irish institutional life.

“The unspoken one is class. And there’s an element of geography, specifically from urban geography,” he says. “A lot has been done but a great deal more remains to be done. People need to see themselves reflected.”

Recruitment campaigns and uniform changes are likely to count for little if the Garda is seen as an inherently discriminatory organisation. In 2020, Insp David McInerney, formerly of the Garda ethnic liaison office, published a startling study of race relations within the force.

Almost one-third of gardaí surveyed, as part of McInerney’s doctoral research into the ethnic liaison programme, expressed a negative view of black Africans while a similar proportion held a negative view of Arabs.

Even more concerning was the fact that not a single frontline garda surveyed expressed a positive view about members of the Travelling community.

In response Garda headquarters pointed out that the research was conducted at least six years previously and that many improvements had been made since then, including a revamp and expansion of the minority outreach system.

But it can be difficult to gauge how effective these measures have been, for the same reason it is difficult to gauge diversity within the force itself – the data does not exist and gardaí are not allowed to collect it.

The Policing Authority has recently sought figures detailing Garda “stop and search” tactics and the ethnicity of those being stopped.

“We would be naive and it would be self-delusional if we thought Ireland was a complete outlier in this respect, and that there was a precisely proportional representation of the entire population in people who are stopped and searched,” Collins told a Policing Authority meeting last year.

New Irish

"We currently, under the legislative framework, have no power to collate those figures. So in the absence of those we don't have the readily available information that would be available to other police services," Hilman told The Irish Times. Changing this is a matter for the Oireachtas, she added.

The challenges of policing a diverse Ireland are ever-changing. Providing a policing service to the people who arrived in Ireland with Makowski in the early 2000s requires a different approach than providing a service to their now grown sons and daughters.

"It's a constant challenge," says Pat Leahy, former assistant commissioner for the Dublin region. "New Irish were kind of like ourselves when they went abroad, they kind of accept whatever they find. But second and third generation, they don't think like that, nor should they.

“Their expectations are much higher. Which means the delivery of service must be much higher as well. There’s a pretty significant learning curve in it for everybody.”

These challenges were brought sharply into focus by the death of George Nkencho, a young black man from the Igbo ethnic group in Nigeria, who was shot dead by gardaí outside his north Dublin home in December 2020.

Nkencho had been brandishing a knife at the time and suffered from mental health issues. A Garda Síochána Ombudsman Commission inquiry and a repeatedly delayed inquest will determine if gardaí followed proper procedures but at this stage there does not appear to be a racial element to the shooting.

Nkencho’s family also suffered racist abuse in the months after his death and were eventually forced to move home.

The response, said Hilman, was to roll out additional training for gardaí in the Blanchardstown area “to focus on the local policing issues in that area”.

Much of this work involves simply “listening to what communities are telling us”, she said, “especially what second-generation young black men are saying about what their relationship with [the Garda] is”.

“The relationship [between gardaí and the black Irish community] can be improved,” said Obi Odemena, leader of the Igbo Union of Dublin. The Nkencho shooting highlighted fractures in this relationship rather than caused them.

Since then gardaí have been more mindful in their dealings with the African community, he said. “But when something is institutionised, it takes a while for that culture change to happen.”