Twenty years of handling police complaints in Ireland: a critical assessment of the supervisory board model

Twenty years after Ireland adopted an external supervisory board model to promote public confidence in the handling of complaints against the police (the Garda Síochána), it had to replace it with a cross between the Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland and the Independent Police Complaints Commission in England and Wales. This paper examines the nature and scale of the board's failure and offers a critique of the internal and external factors responsible. It focuses, in particular, on how the police and the government, acting separately and in combination, managed to smother the potential of the supervisory board model. It also offers insights into how the board contributed to its own failure. The paper concludes by drawing attention to the fact that several of these negative forces can also be active in the new complaints procedure that commenced operations in 2007.