Earlier this year during a seminar on organised crime, Irish investigative journalist Donal MacIntyre made a startling assertion.
Gangs are encouraging young people to join police forces and go “deep cover”, he said, until they are senior officers and in a position to pass on valuable information to criminals.
“This happens,” said MacIntyre. “I’ve spoken to major Irish gangsters who have operated in Ireland and in Manchester who have explicitly told me they have officers in their pay.”
This may be one of the reasons, he said, that police forces struggle to convict “the upper echelons of the underworld”.
At the time, the idea that the Garda Síochána could be experiencing such extreme levels of corruption seemed fanciful to some of the attendees, perhaps a symptom of watching too much Line of Duty.
It seemed less fanciful four months later when the Garda launched its new Anti-Corruption Unit and its chief, Joanna O’Leary, told journalists it was already investigating a complaint of “infiltration from organised crime groups”.
The events of recent weeks have made MacIntyre’s claim seem more credible, and shown how vulnerable the force may be to wealthy criminals willing to pay for information.
The Garda has faced a barrage of negative headlines relating to allegations of corruption, criminality and misconduct over the past fortnight. The most serious of these relate to allegations that sensitive Garda information was passed onto the Hutch organised crime group.
It is understood the information that kickstarted this corruption investigation came to light only while gardaí were extraditing the alleged leader of the gang, Gerry Hutch, back to Ireland to face a murder charge in relation to the shooting of David Byrne at the Regency Hotel in 2016.
The Garda National Bureau of Criminal Investigation (NBCI) is investigating if serving gardaí were involved in passing on sensitive information to Hutch criminals via an intermediary. If investigators can prove that information was handed over, the next step will be proving the gardaí knew the gang were the final recipients.
Careless pub talk may form the basis for disciplinary action or minor criminal charges. But if it is proven that the gardaí, one of whom works in Garda intelligence, were disclosing information to assist criminality, they may face the far more serious charge of assisting a criminal organisation.
One of the gardaí has already been suspended and at least five searches have been carried out.
In terms of the Garda’s public reputation, news of the investigation could not have come at a worse time. In the same week, several other gardaí were arrested or suspended for various instances of alleged criminality or misconduct.
These include two gardaí arrested and questioned in relation to the alleged assault of a teenager in a north Dublin Garda station earlier in the year, and another who was suspended for allegedly leaking information to the media about Hutch’s extradition.
In the south of the country, a garda was arrested on suspicion of sexually abusing his daughters over a number of years. In Dublin, investigators are carrying out a “scoping exercise” into allegations that two gardaí stole money from a female food delivery rider they stopped on the street.
The flurry of suspensions and arrests followed another incident at the end of September, during which a garda allegedly used excessive force on a 14-year-old he arrested for unlawful use of a scrambler bike. The incident, which was caught on video and widely shared online, is being investigated by the Garda Síochána Ombudsman Commission (Gsoc). The garda in question has since been suspended.
Meanwhile, in Limerick a seemingly endless investigation into the cancellation of penalty points and the transmission of intelligence to criminals has resulted in the suspension of 10 gardaí and criminal charges against some of them.
Why is it that, seven years after the emergence of the whistleblower scandal involving Maurice McCabe and three years into a massive reform programme, stories of garda wrongdoing are back in the headlines?
And what effect is this endless series of suspensions and arrests having on the 14,000-strong force?
Harris’s fight
Many of the recent developments can be linked to the appointment of former PSNI second-in-command Drew Harris as Garda Commissioner in 2018. Since then, Harris has made fighting corruption and malpractice a pillar of his tenure.
He has been quick to deploy the NBCI, sometimes referred to as Ireland’s equivalent of the FBI, to investigate offences, and in some cases, even disciplinary breaches. He has not hesitated to order the suspension of officers while investigations are ongoing, even if those investigations take years.
Since Harris was appointed, 105 gardaí have been suspended for alleged misconduct or criminality. This reached a peak last year when 41 members were suspended. In the first 10 months of 2021, an additional 24 gardaí were suspended.
Many of these suspensions have been welcomed by both rank-and-file and senior gardaí, particularly when they related to corruption or criminality.
“If you’re going to choose the nuclear option, you must be right. It’s about the finding the balance,” says Pat Leahy, who retired as assistant commissioner for the Dublin region last year. “But I don’t think anyone will argue that if you have a guard who is breaking the law, you [don’t] have to take the action that is required.”
Nobody likes to hear of garda corruption or suspensions, Leahy says. “But if it’s true and the information is accurate, it has to be done.”
It is the investigation into 'ticket squaring', or the cancellation of penalty points, in Limerick that is causing most discontent within the Garda rank-and-file
Gardaí do not like when stories appear showing the organisation in a negative light, says security consultant and former detective Sheelagh Brady. “That’s a pride thing. But there is more anger when corruption goes on and is not dealt with and is swept under the carpet.
“Personally speaking, I would have been more angry when I heard of cases that are not being dealt with in a hard-hitting way, or [are] dealt with internally. Most guards actually like when action is taken.”
However, Harris has faced anger over many of his actions, particularly in relation to the Limerick penalty points investigation. This is not limited to lower ranks. Senior officers have privately expressed concerns that the commissioner has been overzealous at times, to the detriment of garda morale.
Sources repeatedly raise the case of John Barrett, the civilian director of human resources in the Garda. In 2018, Barrett was suspended by the commissioner relating to internal communications he sent to colleagues, which Garda lawyers alleged were “threatening, inappropriate and unprofessional”, and relating to an alleged attempt to frustrate a separate disciplinary process against him.
Harris recommended that Barrett be fired (as a civil servant, Barrett can only be dismissed by the Minister for Justice). Barrett is currently fighting this in court.
Use of ‘touts’
Even the establishment of the Anti-Corruption Unit by Harris last March has not been without controversy. The unit was set up on the back of a Garda Inspectorate report that identified a range of areas where the force was vulnerable to corruption.
These included drug use by gardaí, which exposes them to blackmail and puts them in casual contact with criminal gangs, and improper relationships with intelligence sources.
Known officially as Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Chis) and less officially as “touts”, these informants can be invaluable resources in fighting crime and preventing violence. However, the necessarily secretive nature of the Chis system means gardaí are also at risk of developing improper relationships with their sources. These can include sexual relations or instances where the garda ends up working for the Chis rather than the other way around.
The inspectorate, in a 2020 report, noted that there was no framework within the Garda for how officers should manage professional boundaries with an informant outside of the formal interaction process. “The Chis Charter does not explicitly prohibit sexual or emotional relationships with a Chis or the acceptance of gifts or hospitality from them,” it says.
The launch of the anti-corruption unit and associated media coverage caused anger within the Association of Garda Sergeants and Inspectors and the Garda Representative Association (GRA). "The GRA take exception at the unilateral attempt by Garda management to introduce policy change without consultation and agreement," it told its members.
The establishment of the unit also angered Gsoc, which complained it was not consulted and that the establishment of the unit “flies in the face of the . . . basic principle that gardaí should not be investigating themselves without scrutiny.”
Anger in Limerick
But it is the Limerick investigation into "ticket squaring", or the cancellation of penalty points, that is causing most discontent within the Garda rank-and-file. The matter started as an investigation by the NBCI into allegations that gardaí had tipped off a criminal gang about a upcoming raid by the Criminal Assets Bureau. This investigation has since resulted in a number of gardaí being charged with corruption offences.
While gathering evidence in that investigation, detectives came across mobile phone messages suggesting that some gardaí were also improperly cancelling penalty points for motorists. That aspect of the investigation has since snowballed, with at least 100 gardaí interviewed to date and 60 mobile phones seized.
The investigation and suspensions are seen by many gardaí as wildly disproportionate to the alleged wrongdoing.
Last month, Fianna Fáil TD Cathal Crowe described the investigation as a “witch trial” and criticised Harris. “Drew Harris is a good man, but the model of policing he is seeking to replicate is that which operates in the six counties of Northern Ireland. It is quite a different model,” he told the Dáil.
The GRA declined to comment on the matter, but sources within the organisation point to the principle of discretion, which allows gardaí to, for example, cancel a speeding ticket if the recipient was driving his severely ill wife to hospital. “This is something that is in the code of conduct,” one says. “A couple of these guys have cancelled something like three tickets over a two-year period, and were instructed to do it by a superior who said that there was genuine reason for cancellation.
“The feeling among the Limerick division is this has been a witch hunt and that is going to blow up in [Garda management’s] faces. Remember there are people out on suspension for two years over this,” the garda says.
“Morale is on the floor here,” says another. “A big frustration is gardaí who cancelled tickets for someone they don’t know, on orders from a superior, are getting lumped in with guards who are actually corrupt and receiving money for favours.”
Public perception
It might be reasonable to assume the recent steady stream of allegations against gardaí has damaged the force’s reputation among the general public. But previous trends suggest that might not be so.
In 2010, 77 per cent of people surveyed said they trusted the Garda, according to the polling company Ipsos, which tracks public trust in institutions.
Over the subsequent years this figure increased, despite a series of policing scandals that prompted the latest reform programme. In 2015, after the McCabe controversy came to light, 79 per cent of people expressed trust. In March of this year, that figure had increased to 83 per cent, making gardaí more trusted than judges, economists and civil servants.
“Trust has held up quite well in recent years, surprisingly,” says Ipsos managing director Damian Loscher. “Whatever scandals there have been, whatever controversy, it has not penetrated to the public.”
We will have to wait for Ipsos’s next poll to find out if these latest controversies have changed the public’s view.
