Capital's streets would be safer under the 'old guard' - judge
THE country would be a safer place today if old-style gardai were still targeting "street nuisances", a controversial judge claimed last night.
Justice Paul Carney recalled the methods of Detective Sergeant James 'Lugs' Brannigan, an officer who dominated the District Court in the late 1960s and who carried a knuckle duster for his protection.
Delivering a lecture at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, the judge said that Brannigan, in these more politically correct times, would probably be abolished by the Garda Ombudsman Commission and "possibly also prosecuted".
But he suggested that had Sgt Brannigan's unit, known as Prevention and Detection of Street Nuisances, been continued, "the streets of Dublin would be considerably safer than they are now". Justice Carney, adjunct professor at NUI Maynooth, was speaking about his experience of gardai in the courtroom over a career spanning 42 years.
Displaying an apparent nostalgia for less PC days, Justice Carney even equivocated about the practices employed by the so-called Heavy Gang, a group of gardai who allegedly pressurised suspects, using assaults, threats, lies and psychological tricks during the 1970s.
Confessions
"The Heavy Gang believed they were under pressure in troubled times to secure confessions and consequential convictions and acted out of this misguided and wholly inexcusable motivation rather than gratuitous badness," the judge suggested.
He stressed that while allegations of physical ill treatment or other abuses arose in almost every case before the courts at that time, it was during an era when "forensic evidence scarcely existed and the confession was very heavily relied upon in any prosecution". Justice Carney said he could not totally explain why there has been such a dramatic change, from allegations of impropriety in nearly every case to virtually no such allegations nowadays.
The judge said he was satisfied that the transformation was not simply the result of the introduction of video-recording of interrogations, despite garda resistance to that practice.
"I think it may be that a fundamental decency, which has always been there, has reasserted itself in the guards and that this is worth recording and acknowledging," he said.
In October 2007, the judge sparked controversy when, during a lecture at University College Cork, he criticised grieving mother Majella Holohan for the unscripted remarks in her victim impact statement during the sentencing of her son Robert's killer Wayne O'Donoghue.
- Grainne Cunningham
