Gardai, RUC and FBI officers are to meet in Northern Ireland next week as part of a joint RUC-Garda community policing initiative which started earlier this year and is strongly endorsed in yesterday's report by the Patten commission.
The joint Garda/RUC initiative involves an exchange of ideas on community-based policing which, it is hoped, will lead to common policy between the two forces. It is being assisted by the FBI which earlier this year hosted another conference at its academy in Quantico, Virginia. About 20 officers up to chief superintendent rank from the RUC and the Garda will attend next week's conference in the North.
The Patten report strongly endorses increased levels of co-operation between police in the Republic and Northern Ireland.
The report recommends that specialist members from the two services' drugs and training units should be "loaned" to each organisation on periods of "fixed-term secondments".
The commission said it was surprised to discover the two forces did not have a joint plan for dealing with disasters. The report called for this "serious omission" to be "rectified immediately", and called for a "pooling of investigative teams" and an exchange of personnel when major cross-Border incidents occurred.
While acknowledging that both forces viewed the present relationship as "a good one", particularly in terms of tackling terrorism, the report said co-operation occurred on "an ad-hoc basis" and was "dependent on personal relationships". The commission said co-operation should become more structured, with joint training exercises and with liaison officers from each service being appointed to the central headquarters and/or Border areas of each force.
It also recommended that written protocols should be drawn up and signed by the RUC - renamed as the Northern Ireland Police Service - and the gardai to tackle issues such as cross-Border crime, including smuggling, vehicle theft and organised crime.
Last night, the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform, Mr O'Donoghue, said the commission's recommendations for greater co-operation between the Garda Siochana and the Northern Ireland police would ensure that police effectiveness on this island would be second to none. ????????????????i in their welcome for the report's recommendations which included a formalising of relations between the two forces and greater co-operation in training and operational matters.
Of the 175 recommendations, 11 were related to measures to improve the relationship and effectiveness of the two police forces. These ranged from seeking to recruit Northern Ireland Catholic officers in the Garda to join the Northern Ireland police, to organising fixed-term secondments between the two forces for staff in specialist fields such as drugs, and providing for improved communications and intelligence sharing between the forces.
The Minister said the report was a detailed and complex document which, from a purely policing and police management point of view, would be studied with interest not only in Republic of Ireland and in the United Kingdom, but further afield also. The report encouraged further strengthening of police effectiveness through the enhancement of the already excellent level of contact and co-operation between police services on both sides of the border, he said.
The president of the Association of Garda Superintendents, Supt Pat Diggin, gave a broad welcome to the proposals, which he said had to be viewed within the context of greater co-operation between all EU police forces within a Union where there was free movement of citizens.
"There is already close co-operation, with a number of gardai already working as liaison officers with European police forces in areas such as drug trafficking," he said. "With Northern Ireland being an immediate neighbour, this is all the more relevant."
There was considerable co-operation between the Garda and the RUC, the superintendent said. Intelligence was regularly exchanged on the movement of suspected criminals and the Garda Commissioner, Mr Pat Byrne, and the RUC Chief Constable, Sir Ronnie Flanagan, had had a number of meetings on cross-Border policing.
The national executive of the Association of Garda Sergeants and Inspectors is expected to discuss the report's recommendations at its meeting next Monday and Tuesday.