Mr George Maybury of the Association of Garda Sergeants and Inspectors had a point when he reminded an interviewer yesterday on RTE that "the guards have the prisons and the courts full." Mr Maybury was responding to reports that the Strategic Management Initiative has found the Garda Siochana to be inflexible, over centralised and in urgent need of structural reform.
His point and gardai of all ranks and affiliations would find themselves in unusual unanimity in agreeing with him is that in singling out the police service for critical assessment, the Government is concentrating unwisely on just one part of the criminal justice system. The guards operate as part of a large and complex organism which embraces the prosecution services, the courts, the prisons and correctional services and the Department of Justice.
The decision to put the Garda under special scrutiny, announced after the Veronica Guerin murder, has caused enormous resentment among the membership. It has been seen as an unwarranted pointing of the finger at an organisation which believes that within the limits of the law it has discharged its responsibilities well. It is difficult not to sympathise with that view, especially when one considers the long history of failure by governments to respond to calls for help from within the force and urgings towards reform from outside it.
There is little in the latest report that was not diagnosed and prescribed for by the Conroy Commission a full 25 years ago. Indeed, there is no small paradox in the fact that the present Commissioner, Mr Patrick Byrne, is contractually obliged to co operate in implementing the Strategic Management Initiative. For some of his predecessors over the years and, at other times, various staff associations within the force, have urged many of the measures which are now proposed, only to be obstructed by civil servants, fobbed off by Ministers and ignored by Opposition shadows.
Fundamental problems with the Garda, identified by Conroy a quarter of a century ago, remain central to today's malaise. There is uncertainty as to its role and its relationships with other bodies most especially with the Department of Justice. There is no tradition of management by objectives. It has no criteria for success or failure other than in the notoriously unreliable equations which supposedly determine crime detection rates. And since it lacks clarity in these key matters, all aspects of its organisation from training to public relations tend to be similarly clouded and hampered.
In turn, the Garda's uncertainties reflect those of the criminal justice system as a whole. There are no policy objectives, no measures of success or failure, no guiding concept of what the community wants or expects. The Strategic Management Initiative can clothe old problems anew and may, in certain respects, lead to a better run police service. But until some government has the courage and vision to take an overview of our criminal justice machine, patchwork efforts, however dressed up in consultants jargon, must remain just patchwork.