Corruption at heart of the Garda
The Abbeylara report by Robert Barr is superb. Repetitious in part, curiously avoiding any overall assessment of the complicity of the media (as we see it) in the tragic outcome, surprisingly supportive of the decision to involve the Garda Emergency Response Unit (ERU) in an incident concerning a mentally-ill man in a painful ordeal. But the report is rigorous in its assessment of Garda incompetence and negligence. Forthright in its findings that Garda witnesses would not be believed and that in a central issue there may have been a cover up.
We will return to this report in next week's Village, analysing its detail – which is far more damning of the gardaí than has so far emerged.
If we needed reminding that there is corruption, incompetence and negligence at the heart of An Garda Síochána, outside the Donegal area, this is it. The same lax standards, the same sheer ineptitude, the same carelessness, the same propensity to lie and cover up is here again in stark illustration.
Had even elementary measures been taken to discover what it was that agitated John Carthy, it would have been perceived that he hated the gardaí and with good reason because they abused him some time previously and they engaged in a subterfuge to take away his gun. The Garda authorities (if there is such an entity) might have appreciated the presence of gardaí surrounding his house was more likely to make matters much worse.
Robert Barr suspects there was a deliberate avoidance of John Carthy's previous dealings with An Garda Síochána because any focus on that would disturb a cover up!
Reading the report leaves one with some admiration for the diligent efforts of people such as Sergeant Michael Jackson, the well-intentioned mediator whose expertise and experience were inadequate for the task. Also the head of the ERU at the scene, Detective Sergeant Gerard Russell. It is also possible to have sympathy with the two gardaí who shot and killed John Carthy because of the stressed circumstances in which they found themselves – circumstances which, as Robert Barr shows brilliantly, should never have been allowed to materialise.
But the failure to interview properly members of John Carthy's immediate family, the failure to interview properly his local doctor, the failure to interview properly the friend, Kevin Ireland, whom John Carthy telephoned a few hours before he was killed, are instances of staggering incompetence and negligence.
Of a similar incompetence and negligence was the failure to plan what should happen if John Carthy emerged from his home carrying his gun and the failure to remove from the immediate vicinity of the house garda personnel who were superfluous to security requirements – this latter failure was the immediate cause of John Carthy's killing.
How Michael McDowell thinks it was inappropriate to criticise the most senior garda at the scene, the then assistant commissioner, Tony Hickey, is difficult to understand, since this officer was in a position to advise that John Carthy's doctor should be interviewed in depth, that the reasons for John Carthy's antagonism towards gardaí should be investigated, that the command post be moved from where it was stationed, that superfluous gardaí be removed from the scene, that a clear plan on what to do if John Carthy emerge armed be devised.
It isn't individual gardaí alone, however, who stand indicted by this report – it is An Garda Síochána. There is a major problem with the force – its competence, its standards, its truthfulness and its culture – that Michael McDowell has failed to address in spite of the screaming evidence of all this, first from the Morris tribunal reports now from the Barr tribunal report.
Vincent Browne