Police, Race and Culture in the 'new Ireland'

An Ethnography

Sam O'Brien-Olinger

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137490445
• eBook ISBN: 9781137490452
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Civil Rights in Law
• Index: Social Sciences

This book explores the relationship between the Irish police and ethnic minorities, made particularly pressing by the rapid ethnic diversification of Irish society. It addresses the current deficit in knowledge of this area by exploring how Irish police officers conceive of, talk about, and interact with Ireland's immigrant minority communities.

Part I

Context

Introduction

Under the heading ‘Phantom Pole haunts Garda at alternative Nobel Awards’, the Irish Times newspaper (3 October 2009) stated that:

They’ll be clearing space in the trophy cabinet at the Phoenix Park headquarters this weekend after An Garda Síochána gained dubious international recognition by winning an award at the annual Ig Nobel ceremony in the US.¹

The Ig Nobel awards are organised by the Annals of Improbable Research, a satirical science magazine, with the aim of honouring achievements that ‘first make people laugh and then make them think’. Designers of a bra that turns into a gas mask for two, and a team of scientists who found that named cows produce more milk were among the other winners at the ceremony held at Harvard University. The accolade was awarded to the force for figuring out that ‘Prawo Jazdy’ is actually the Polish term for ‘driving licence’ and not the name of a man they had been looking for with numerous entries for traffic violations on the Garda computer system. As the Irish Times reported on 19 February 2009 under the headline ‘Dictionary helps crack case of notorious Polish serial offender’²:

So effective was his modus operandi of giving a different address each time he was caught that by June 2007 there were more than 50 separate entries under his name, Prawo Jazdy, in the Garda PULSE³ system. And still not one conviction.⁴

Since members of the Garda traffic corps realised they had been taking the Polish term down in error as the actual identity of the motorists, this mistake has been rectified and the Garda computer system has been updated with a new section advising officers of the layout of a number of foreign driving licences.

While conducting a routine interview at the early stages of fieldwork I found myself, by sheer chance, talking with the Guard who had first identified the mistake and raised the alarm.⁵ While discussing general dealings with ‘foreigners’, he began to tell me about a number of issues, particularly problems Guards have with language barriers:

(Male Garda i; Newtown station; March 2009)

A prime example of it was not long ago, it was reported in the news, for the Polish driver’s licences. Some fella called “Prawo Jazdy” kept getting stopped and summonses issued for him … I did it myself, I went to an accident and I looked at the licence and took down the fella’s name as “Prawo Jazdy” and I phoned up his boss later that day and says “your driver, Prawo Jazdy was involved in an accident. I just need to get the insurance details” and he goes “I don’t know who the hell that is!” so he goes off and asks around and he laughs, “well Guard, that’s actually the Polish for driver’s licence”

The Ig Nobel prize was certainly appropriate recognition of the error because, although humorous, it also makes one think. In fact, when the Irish Times made contact with the force about receiving the international award, a Garda spokesperson said: ‘We’re aware of it, but we’re not in a position to comment.’⁶ This example encapsulates the depth and breadth of the impact which the recent and rapid ethnic diversification of Irish society has had on some of the most basic facets of Irish policing. This Garda spokesperson had unwittingly captured in their comment a dominant feature of the current policing situation in Ireland which this book aims to shed light on: that the force and its members may certainly be aware that they now operate under very different circumstances, as they face a range of novel challenges related to policing a more diverse public, but they remain uncomfortably ambiguous about the major social changes they experience as they continue to negotiate their way around this unfamiliar terrain. There exists little empirical research and a dearth of information about the now topical relationship between policing immigrant ethnic minorities and the phenomenon of racism in Ireland. This book aims to address that deficit by providing new knowledge on these interconnected areas. It does so by revealing how Irish police officers conceive of, talk about, and interact with ethnic minority communities.

In the last two decades Ireland has undergone an unprecedented level of inward migration and ethnic change. In effect, Ireland continues to represent a new test case for inter-racial relations. Given its role as a key institution of the state, with primary responsibility for the provision of public safety, national security, and immigration control, these changes have had enormous implications for An Garda Síochána. Since its inception in 1922, the force has been an emblem of an independent, Catholic, Gaelic, and ethnically homogeneous Ireland, and to this day is considered to be one of the most successful institutions of the state involved in nation-building. This historical ‘success’ has traditionally insulated the force from pressure to keep in step with a changing society. However, the recent and rapid demographic transformation of Irish society poses significant challenges for the force as it now engages with a multicultural public. In a relatively short space of time Ireland’s national police force has found itself providing a service to approximately 145–199 different nationalities that can account for as much as 20 per cent of the local population in some Garda districts, and as much as half the population of certain Dublin housing estates and residential areas. Indeed the annual school census for 2013–14 showed that 23 per cent of schools were catering for four out of five children from an immigrant background; and that 745 primary schools had recorded that over 79 per cent of their students were not of Irish nationality.⁷ By the mid-2000s the traditional concepts of ‘nation’ and understandings of ‘community’ that had essentially underpinned the foundation of the state, and its police force, since gaining independence from British rule had become not only temporarily disrupted but irreversibly antiquated (see Fanning 2014).⁸ This move away from the near century-long social situation of policing within a relatively ethnically homogeneous environment therefore represents uncharted waters for members of An Garda Síochána.

The recent demographic transformation of Irish society has presented the force with a range of novel and substantial tests as its members engage with a multi-ethnic public for the first time in its history. This gives rise to a number of sociological questions regarding the impact of this fundamental alteration to the field of Irish policing. The central question addressed by this book, therefore, is how have An Garda Síochána and its members been adapting to the unprecedented challenges that immigration and ethnic diversity now presents. Consequently, the immediate goal of the research for this book was to gather and analyse information on the daily street-level practices and experiences of officers who routinely come into contact with members of ethnic minorities. In doing so the research aimed to provide the first ever ethnographic insight into Irish policing and, more specifically, to learn about how Irish police officers as individuals and as a subculture are collectively adapting to this new social environment and to critically assess what the organisational policing response has been to this unprecedented development.

By studying the experiences of Irish police officers, and the discourses they draw on to make sense of policing an increasingly diverse public, this book examines how Guards’ conceptions serve to create, alter, reproduce, justify, rationalise, legitimise, and indeed challenge the complex relationship between Irish police and ethnic minority populations that is currently unfolding. In assessing the institutional and organisational response of An Garda Síochána to this dramatic change, the book provides a sociological account of the processes by which issues surrounding national identity, the nation-state, belonging, and discourses surrounding crime and cultural difference are presently interfacing in the ‘new Ireland’. The fieldwork for this book was carried out between 2006 and 2011. The result provides a snapshot of major transition for Irish policing at one of its most critical moments. In this way the book constitutes the first significant examination of issues regarding policing and race in the Irish context and provides the first case study of its kind to explore how An Garda Síochána’s essential cultural role and foundational national symbolism is being reconfigured in contemporary Irish society.

1

Situating the Present

A long story short: From policing old Ireland to new

In his work on police accountability in Ireland, Manning (2012) describes An Garda Síochána as a ‘Hybrid’ (351):

Their obligations as a national force on the one hand resemble those of the Gendarmerie of France, combining national security and domestic policing and differ somewhat from the British model (found with modifications in Australia, Canada and the United States) of locally or state-based organisations or Constabularies with some local political and economic obligations. Like the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), they are nationally funded and police both the capital and the hinterland. They have vast regulatory functions, including issuing passports. Unlike the French, English and American systems in which the Prefecture of Paris, the London Metropolitan Police and the Metropolitan Police of Washington DC, police the national capital, there is no distinctive police serving Dublin exclusively. Ireland, as of 1937, has a written constitution which associates its practices and constraints in legal terms more with the policing in the United States than with policing in common law nations.

(ibid.)

He also tells us how contemporary Irish policing has evolved out of colonial origins with a legacy driven by the assumption ‘that governance and security were obligations of the state, and their role as an organisation was unbending loyalty to the state and protection of its security’ (ibid.). ‘The Guards’ are

a miniature representation of several themes in the history of the nation … they reflect the revolutionary ‘spirit’, the actions in founding them by the centre figures in the rebellion, heroes of the struggle, those who died in revolution, and shaped the organisation from the beginning … There is, as there is in regard to all sacred objects, an awe attached to them, a mystery and an otherworldliness that insulates them from everyday secular judgments. They stand for authority of an indigenous sort, in some sense for an Ireland free of England, and an organisation intrinsically and originally Irish. This ensemble, of course, does not always hold, they violate public trust and the contradictions between their mundane and sometimes violent duties and their quasisacred status are occasionally made visible.

(Manning 2012, 352)

As ‘a receptacle, a conflated assemblage of powerful symbolic themes’ (ibid.), An Garda Síochána’s present-day iconic status requires some historical contextualisation. Following Independence in 1922, the establishment of the Free State, and the civil war that ensued, tensions continued to exist between those with strong republican sentiments and the police. This tension was mainly concentrated in parts of the west and along border areas right up until the Second World War. ‘[N]evertheless, by the 1930s most parts of Ireland were characterized by high levels of political stability, and the upheaval surrounding the formation of the state and the subsequent civil war appeared to be largely resolved’ (Mulcahy 2007, 6;¹ also see Brady 1974). The stability and character of post-Independence Ireland proved to be a rich and fertile ground for an institution such as An Garda Síochána to take root and become deeply embedded in daily cultural life. There were a number of social conditions which allowed for this success. One such factor was how the dominant cultural nationalism of the day privileged a very specific image and concept of community and identity that the Guards came to reflect, represent, and, in turn, reproduce (see McNiffe 1997). The now somewhat clichéd version of Irish nationalism, of which the police became emblematic, and that its recruiters deliberately set out to embody, was underpinned by visions of a rural and agricultural idyll, rather than an urban or industrialised one, characterised by devout Catholic religious observance, moral conservatism, asceticism, and innocence. The perennial problem of Ireland’s precarious economy was never a feature of this ideological representation, but is recognised as the major cause of ensuring historically endemic emigration rates that have only levelled out, and subsequently been reversed, in the last two decades. Indeed, it has been argued that such high emigration accounts for much of Ireland’s historical cultural stasis and characteristically slow rate of social change (see Loyal 2003). Another factor involved in the organisation’s success is how Ireland was dominated at this time, and for many subsequent decades, by a social conservatism which included a type of deference to authority that is best reflected in the literature documenting the all-pervasive influence of the Catholic Church, specifically in relation to it having a monopoly over such spheres as education, sexuality, and public morality more generally (see Inglis 1998 and 2003).

The strong bond forged between policing and the cultural nationalism of the day also occurred through a variety of more conscious efforts at the initial stages of the organisation’s evolution and inception into daily Irish life. The position the force came to inhabit was established early on in its history, the consequences of which continue to be experienced today throughout a range of contexts. These exist at an everyday institutional and individual level, on a national and local scale, and in both a grand and overarching, more ‘abstract’ symbolic capacity as well as in terms of more mundane and immediate ‘day-to-day’ tangible street-level settings. With these factors in mind, Mulcahy (2008a) outlines how An Garda Síochána’s initial and continuing success as a police organisation derived from the way it managed to mobilise itself on two specific fronts:

First, it orientated itself to the symbolic task of representing the [newly established] state – in ways that clearly identified it as an expression of this political independence and of the broad community whose interests this political independence was argued to represent. Second, it addressed policing at a specifically local level – in ways that demonstrated the organic ties between guards and members of the community.

(Mulcahy 2008a, 192)

The fundamentally ideological aim of establishing the Guards as ‘Irish in thought and action’ (Commissioner Staines) was undoubtedly further bolstered by the historically high levels of social consensus, relative ethnic homogeneity, and monoculturalism (see Mulcahy 2008b), which produced, and continues still to maintain, an enduring legacy that features heavily in contemporary discourses surrounding An Garda Síochána.

The insertion and incorporation of Guards into the daily lives of those they policed was initially achieved by a number of means that came to fundamentally shape the field of Irish policing and which continue to influence its contours and content today. That these processes have had long-lasting effects is not to say that policing remains unchanged or somehow the same. It is to make the point that those effects are still felt and embodied in interactions between police officers and members of the public alike. It is also to recognise that these effects continue to residually influence the dominant ‘cultural mentalities’ (systems of cognition and belief) and sensibilities (configurations of affect) which constitute the Irish policing habitus and field – as well as the public’s expectations of Guards and policing. These efforts to embed the police into the public provide a context for contrasting the character or ‘condition of policing in Ireland’ (see Loader and Mulcahy 2007) before Celtic Tiger immigration with the situation afterwards. In this way we can better appreciate why ethnic diversity and cultural pluralism might pose such a significant policing challenge. These processes were:

• The prominence of the Irish language in recruiting and training Guards.

• The close ties An Garda Síochána cultivated with the Catholic Church.

• The recruitment of individuals who embodied the nationalist ideological ethos of the force.

• The fostering of a Garda culture of heavy involvement in Gaelic games.

It has been generally accepted that the first three to four decades after Independence saw very little change in the mode of policing in Ireland. From An Garda Síochána’s inception in the 1920s, during the solidification of its legitimacy and the establishment of its authority in the following decades, and right up until the 1950s, it remained the case that ‘Ireland was relatively unperturbed by crime’ (Kilcommins et al. 2004, 205). Stability and stasis in this regard therefore led the period to be characterised as a policeman’s paradise (Brady 1974, 240). Indeed, in a speech in 1950, the Minister for Justice, Sean MacEoin, stated that:

it is a fact that, by comparison with other countries, this country is very free from crime … As well as giving ourselves a pat on the back for being a law abiding people, I feel we should thank An Garda Síochána, whose vigilance must be largely responsible for this satisfactory state of affairs.

(ibid.)

It is debatable as to whether this ‘satisfactory state of affairs’, allowing Ireland to enjoy such a stable low-crime climate, was due more to the soaring emigration rate of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part I: Context
• Part II: Theory-Methodology
• Part III: Findings
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index