Reform of police must not stop at the Border

The past in Ireland is still unpredictable. As I write, the two main news headlines relate to events of the early 1970s: Des O'Malley's defence of his actions in relation to the Arms Trial and Martin McGuinness's admission he was a senior IRA officer at the time of the Bloody Sunday massacre. These stories are newsworthy because they have yet to be fully told.

The continuing need to grapple with the Arms Crisis of 1970 points, in particular, to the way the Republic was forced to repress a key part of its recent history. In those months, nationalistic rhetoric came into conflict with bloody realities, and the pub patriots of the South were forced to say, with Pegeen in The Playboy of the Western World, that "a squabble in your backyard and the blow of a loy have taught me that there's a great gap between a gallous story and a dirty deed."

YET, in spite of the best efforts of revisionist intellectuals, the Republic as a whole did not deal with the threat of civil war by thoroughly re-imagining its own political identity. It battened down the hatches by psychologically and in some cases literally repressing its relationship with the Fourth Green Field. In the interests of self-preservation, it mentally sealed off the Border, treating the North as a faraway country.

Given the alternative, this was probably a necessary process. But it had and still has some weird consequences. We often behave as if the Border divided, not just two political realms, but two entirely different worlds. What we say to the North is not what we say to ourselves. To grasp this point, all you have to do is imagine the reaction down here if the British army or the RUC were leading Orange parades and then wonder why our Government has no problem with the army escorting the relics of Saint Therese.

The most serious example of the way this capacity to speak with forked tongues distorts serious debate is the issue of policing. We are now in the Republic in the throes of an emerging crisis of public confidence in the Garda.

The clear inability of the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Justice, Equality, and Women's Rights to get to grips with the death of John Carthy and the fierce determination of the Garda not to be held accountable by elected politicians raises fundamental issues. So too does the apparent inability of the State to deal with allegations of misconduct against gardai in Co Donegal, where all that is really happening is a second internal Garda inquiry. That both of these cases may have to be dealt with through sworn public inquiries exposes the huge gap where democratic accountability should be.

It so happens, meanwhile, that the Government is deeply and passionately engaged with this very question. It really and truly cares about the issue of accountable, professional policing that enjoys the trust of the entire community. It is genuinely committed to the creation of radically new structures for democratic policing, indeed to a model that represents the very best of international thinking on this issue. Provided, of course, that the police force in question is on the other side of the Border.

The report of the Patten Commission, which the Government wants to see implemented in full, is largely concerned with the issue of democratic accountability. "In a democracy," it says, "policing, in order to be effective, must be based on consent across the community. Consent is not unconditional but depends on proper accountability."

This in turn has many aspects: "There is democratic accountability by which the elected representatives of the community tell the police what sort of service they want and hold the police responsible for delivering it. There is transparency by which the community is kept informed and can ask questions about what the police is doing and why." Strict legal accountability and precise financial responsibility are also seen as vital.

Vital as these things are acknowledged to be in the North, they simply don't exist in the Republic. The notion of elected representatives holding the Garda responsible just doesn't operate within the current structures. The ability of the community to ask questions about what the Garda is doing and why has been shown, in relation to Abbeylara and Donegal, to be utterly negligible. The fiasco of the Pulse computer system suggests that even effective financial accountability is too much to ask.

To get proper answers about the killing of John Carthy and the strange events in Donegal we may well have to resort to cumbersome and expensive public inquiries. To get to grips with the underlying problems, however, we need only take down from the shelf a document we have already endorsed and praised: the Patten report.

It recommends a powerful policing board made up of elected politicians and representatives from business, trade unions, the community and voluntary sectors and the legal profession to set goals, monitor performance and deal with public concerns. If, as we tell our friends in the North, this is vital for democratic policing, what kind of policing do we have in the Republic?