A policeman/woman is in some respects an ordinary citizen and in others not. The job of garda is a middle-ranking one in terms of economic and social status, but that is just part of the story.
In another sense, a Garda officer is someone conferred by the State with special powers: the power to investigate and arrest his fellow citizen and bring him face to face with the law. This creates a certain tension in the relationship between the police officer and the unconferred citizen. Most of us know one or several Garda officers, with whom we may have friendly relations.
But there is frequently, at the back of such everyday encountering, an element of needle. Don't you often hear yourself saying things like, "He's a very nice guy, but at the end of the day he's a guard, and those guys are never off duty"? Although most of us "non-guards" recognise our dependence on the police officers who protect us, and frequently feel gratitude on account of individual episodes of service or bravery, many of us harbour a degree of resentment about the fact that, when all is said and done, these guys have the power to drag us off to the cells.
I wonder if perhaps this syndrome is at the back of the otherwise incomprehensible insistence of the Government and, in particular, the Minister for Justice, that the Garda Síochána bow down to the imposition of a reserve police force. I wonder, too, if it is part of the explanation for the almost unanimous media support for this harebrained idea.
If the matter were not so grave, it would have been laughable to hear the Minister last week accuse the Garda Representative Association of playing politics, given that Mr McDowell has manifestly resolved to exploit his present exalted position to create political capital for himself and his party at the expense of the police force of which he is temporarily in charge.
Speaking at the GRA conference in Galway last week, I offered the modest opinion that the scheme is no more than a political stroke born of Mr McDowell's desire to ensure that the PDs, at least, hold their own against Fine Gael in the Clint Eastwood stakes likely to represent one ring of the three-ring general election circus next year.
By any standards the reserve is a mad idea. Perhaps its most redeeming aspect is the virtual certainty that it will come to nothing because of a low take-up by suitable volunteers. Back in the 1980s, I spent a day going around Dublin with Curtis Sliwa, founder of the New York Guardian Angels, a volunteer anti-crime force which operated essentially on an extension of the concept of citizen's arrest. The idea was to establish a Dublin Guardian Angels, which then seemed like a good idea. I appropriated a sizeable chunk of space in a mass-market newspaper for the promotion of Mr Sliwa's fascinating and hugely idealistic ideas. Nothing happened: there were no volunteers.
The probability that much the same thing will happen with McDowell's Angels was the most hopeful message to emerge from several (unreported) contributions to last week's conference by policing experts from other jurisdictions. All said the idea was ludicrous and dangerous, but also that, based on their knowledge of similar initiatives elsewhere, it was bound to collapse under its own absurdity.
And it is, truly, absurd to suggest that a bunch of unpaid volunteers, with three weeks' training, should be given the same powers as full-time police officers who have undergone a rigorous and careful training programme.
A trainee Garda officer must spend 22 weeks in Templemore, followed by 12 weeks' work experience, followed by a further 22 weeks in Templemore, followed by a further two months under the supervision of a fully trained officer. What is all this supposed to be about if it can so readily be dispensed with in respect of volunteer reservists who, in terms of powers and appearance, will be virtually indistinguishable from full-time gardaí?
The loosing on our streets of a bunch of largely untrained, unvetted and relatively unaccountable busybodies will either not work at all - in which case we will have witnessed the attempted humiliation of An Garda Síochána for no good purpose - or it will have trivialised and diminished the role of the police officer in Irish society to an unreclaimable degree. Already morale in An Garda Síochána is in the basement, with many of the most dedicated officers pursuing early retirement or resignedly working out their time.
The reserve force, to the extent that it becomes operational, will have a further disastrous effect on morale. To introduce such an idea at any time would be risky for all kinds of reasons.
To introduce it over the heads of the existing force would in any context seem, to say the least, counter-productive.
But to establish an amateur police force at a time when it is emerging that not even the rigorous and scrupulous training of professional officers is sufficient to ensure that our police force remains immune to abuses is tantamount to reckless endangerment of public safety.