DUBLIN — Hollywood loves cops who are wrenched out of context — stripped of their badges, abandoned by comrades, forced to make a stand on someone else’s turf. Think of Gary Cooper’s shunned marshal in “High Noon,” or Eddie Murphy’s Detroit policeman transplanted in “Beverly Hills Cop,” or more recently the ill-matched Mexican and U.S. detectives in the television series “The Bridge,” people who are forced to work in each other’s jurisdictions after a body is found along the border.
Viewed in this light, the Republic of Ireland’s decision to recruit its next police commissioner from Northern Ireland looks somewhat cinematic.
When Drew Harris takes over in September he will be the first ever commissioner of the Garda Síochána, or Civic Guards, from outside the country. Stirring the political pot further: As the current deputy chief constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, the 53-year-old Harris is also a sworn subject and servant of the British crown, which the Republic of Ireland rejected a century ago.
Ireland has often been described, crudely but not unfairly, as an island dominated by two breeds and two creeds, and Harris, an Ulster Presbyterian of British settler stock, was born on the other side of an at-times bitter sectarian divide from the Irish Roman Catholics who form a large majority in the Republic.
Harris faces the urgent task of reforming the Garda Síochána — a force widely regarded as in crisis following years of poor morale, underfunding, and inadequate training and management. And as he comes through the gates of the Garda Depot in Dublin’s Phoenix Park he will bring with him a dramatic backstory.
During the Northern Ireland Troubles of 1968 to 1998, in which mainly Catholic supporters of a united Ireland sought to violently tear Northern Ireland away from the United Kingdom, Harris’s father was murdered by a car bomb planted by the Irish Republican Army. As a superintendent in the Royal Ulster Constabulary, the predecessor to the Police Service of Northern Ireland, Alwyn Harris was regarded as a “legitimate target” by nationalists seeking a united Ireland.
A photograph from the funeral shows Drew Harris, then 23 and a recent recruit to the RUC, carrying his father’s coffin, which is draped in the Union Jack. Next month he will be sworn in to serve the Irish republic under the Irish tricolor, the flag not only of the legal Dublin government but also of the republican bombers who murdered his father.
The task he now faces would be daunting for anyone. Secretive, inward-looking, and resistant to oversight or change, the 13,000-strong Garda Síochána has in recent years become mired in a series of scandals involving — among other things — poor discipline, collusion by some officers with republican terrorists, fabrication of evidence, misuse of citizens’ personal data, the wrongful dropping of penalties for traffic offences, and the nationwide fabrication of almost 2 million alcohol breath tests in order to meet quotas for random traffic stops.
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A long-running scandal over the alleged mistreatment of internal whistleblowers has in the past four years caused the resignation of two ministers for justice, two Garda commissioners, and the previous prime minister, Enda Kenny.
To end this slide, the government of the present Taoiseach (prime minister) Leo Varadkar decided to seek outside applications for the vacant commissioner’s post.
Harris was chosen because of his experience helping transform the old Royal Ulster Constabulary into the modern Police Service of Northern Ireland, says Professor Edward Burke of the University of Nottingham, who researches security and intelligence matters in Britain and Ireland.
Dominated by Protestants loyal to the British crown, the armed RUC was tasked with policing the Troubles and became largely alienated from Northern Ireland’s large Roman Catholic minority. Following the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, which in effect ended the Troubles, the RUC was absorbed into the modernized PSNI, which actively recruited Catholics to improve the sectarian balance in its ranks.
“Drew Harris comes from an RUC background, which some will hold against him, but he helped push through the reforms against a great deal of internal resistance,” Burke says. “He now presides over what I view as the most effective police force in the U.K., despite a very difficult situation that they have in Northern Ireland because of sectarian divisions and the history of the Troubles.”
It remains to be seen whether Harris’s new subordinates will accept their transplanted boss, but the professional bodies representing rank-and-file and more senior Gardai both issued statements guardedly welcoming his appointment.
Burke believes there is a hunger within the force, particularly at the operational level, for the kind of reforms that the technocratic Harris – who has a degree in criminology from Cambridge and an FBI leadership qualification – is expected to implement.
“You actually see younger Gardaí now paying for courses out of their own pocket in areas like cyber security and criminal investigation, pushing for more skills to do their job,” Burke says. “A reform program offering to help develop skills would be very popular, and I think Harris can win support by improvements like that.”
Despite their historical differences, the Garda Síochána and Harris’s present force have more in common than meets the eye, adds Professor Eunan O’Halpin, who lectures in modern Irish history at Trinity College Dublin and writes on security matters.
“The police forces on either side of the border both ultimately descend from the old Royal Irish Constabulary,” O’Halpin says. “They are (the) same kind of cops, in that they both have political antennae in a way that British police forces don’t. They know who people are, and when to be hard and when to be soft. I think that will help Harris with his new rank and file.”
Harris is already said to have good relations with many senior Gardai due to his former role as head of the PSNI’s crime operations department, in which he liaised with the Gardaí on cross-border intelligence and policing.
Elements of his past will, however, remain problematic. The Garda Síochána is responsible not only for civilian policing but also for most of the Republic of Ireland’s intelligence and counterintelligence functions. Not only is Harris a citizen of another state (although like all people from Northern Ireland he is also entitled under Irish law to Irish citizenship, and is reported to have now applied for an Irish passport), but as head of crime operations in the PSNI he worked closely with the U.K.’s MI5 — a foreign intelligence service. It is still not known how, or whether, the Irish government will address this potential conflict of loyalties.
Sectarianism is no longer a strong force in the Republic of Ireland (unlike the tense and divided North), but Harris’s former service with the RUC — still vilified by hardline republicans — led the county council in Donegal to pass a motion calling for his appointment to be reversed.
The mainstream Irish Republican Army, which murdered his father in 1989, may have officially disbanded under the Good Friday Agreement, but its political wing, Sinn Fein, is now a major legal political force in both parts of the island. Harris angered many within the movement when he sanctioned the arrest of then Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams in 2014 for questioning about the 1972 abduction and murder of Jean McConville, a widowed Belfast mother of 10 (Adams was released without charge).
Relatives of some victims of the Troubles accuse Harris of suppressing investigation into a notorious Protestant murder group, the so-called Glenanne Gang, which is alleged to have colluded with British army intelligence and the RUC special branch in sectarian attacks that claimed dozens of lives.
Within the Garda itself, there were objections to evidence that Harris gave in 2012 to an official inquiry that later concluded that members of the force had provided the IRA with intelligence used in the 1989 ambush and murder of two senior RUC officers traveling home from a meeting with police in the Republic.
Henry McDonald, the Guardian’s veteran Ireland correspondent, says Harris’s habit of speaking his mind could be a shock to the more evasive culture of the Garda Síochána.
“He’s a solid old school Presbyterian, serious and straight. He’ll often speak on the record about things which other policemen might be more restrained about,” McDonald says. “It’s not always like that in Dublin.”
Appointed for a five-year term, Harris will measure his success on a scale with two extremes. On the one hand, he could succeed in revamping and reviving an old-fashioned, inefficient and unhappy police force, opening it up to new skills and transparency. On the other, he could find his efforts frustrated by obstructive subordinates and resentful politicians.
Either way, it will probably make a good film.
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Incoming Irish Police Commissioner Faces Many Challenges as He Crosses Old Divides originally appeared on usnews.com
